Daniele Fanelli: “How an information metric could bring truce to the statistics wars“

Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech)

“How an information metric could bring truce to the statistics wars“

Daniele Fanelli

Abstract: Both sides of debates on P-values, reproducibility, and other meta-scientific issues are entrenched in traditional methodological assumptions. For example, they often implicitly endorse rigid dichotomies (e.g. published findings are either “true” or “false”, replications either “succeed” or “fail”, research practices are either “good” or “bad”), or make simplifying and monistic assumptions about the nature of research (e.g. publication bias is generally a problem, all results should replicate, data should always be shared).

Thinking about knowledge in terms of information may clear a common ground on which all sides can meet, leaving behind partisan methodological assumptions. In particular, I will argue that a metric of knowledge that I call “K” helps examine research problems in a more genuinely “meta-“ scientific way, giving rise to a methodology that is distinct, more general, and yet compatible with multiple statistical philosophies and methodological traditions.

This talk will present statistical, philosophical and scientific arguments in favour of K, and will give a few examples of its practical applications.

Daniele Fanelli is a London School of Economics Fellow in Quantitative Methodology, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science. He graduated in Natural Sciences, earned a PhD in Behavioural Ecology and trained as a science communicator, before devoting his postdoctoral career to studying the nature of science itself – a field increasingly known as meta-science or meta-research. He has been primarily interested in assessing and explaining the prevalence, causes and remedies to problems that may affect research and publication practices, across the natural and social sciences. Fanelli helps answer these and other questions by analysing patterns in the scientific literature using meta- analysis, regression and any other suitable methodology. He is a member of the Research Ethics and Bioethics Advisory Committee of Italy’s National Research Council, for which he developed the first research integrity guidelines, and of the Research Integrity Committee of the Luxembourg Agency for Research Integrity (LARI).