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Is Most Published Research Wrong?

Veritasium · 6.2M views · 2016-08-11 · 12:22

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Overview

Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.

On Hacker News

HN commenters link it whenever a shaky study or the p<0.05 threshold comes up, as a short primer on false positives in science.

Recommended by 8 HN people across 8 months · HN mentions 2017–2025

Topics

Scientific method & science communicationData science & statistics
Search by tags
p-valuesp-hackingreplication crisisstatisticspublication bias

What people said

KK7NIL · 2025-12 · Strong recommendation

Wikipedia is infamously bad at teaching math. This Veritasium video does a great job at explaining how such skewed priors can easily appear in our current academic system and the paradox in general: [VIDEO]

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scotty79 · 2021-08 · Strong recommendation

Please watch this video. It neatly shows why should you treat small and less rigorous studies with suspicion, even if there are many giving some results: [VIDEO]

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sillysaurusx · 2020-10 · Strong recommendation

Cue “p = 0.05 is a random choice” and a big thread about p-hacking. Any takers? It feels like everything to say has already been said about the bias of small sample sizes and the dangers of p-hacking. But it also seems like the discussion is inevitable here. I wonder if there’s a new insight to glean, somehow... For a background on why p-values are misleading, see [VIDEO] which is excellent. He points out that 0.05 was selected by Ronald Fischer in 1925, and people have gone with it since.

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Sources

Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

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