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DarkD on 26 August 2019
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sundin13 said:
Torillian said:

Here's where I'm at dude. You are quoting at me the guy who talks about science for Nerdist.com (a nice guy but someone with a bachelor's in civil and environmental engineering and a masters in science communication) to disprove the conclusions made by a professor of psychology at University of Washington who's published 50 publications within the last ten years, been cited more than 4000 times, and has a plethora of awards including a genius grant. Take this from a scientist, this lady is a rising star in her field and I would need quite a bit of evidence before I believe she's just a dipshit who doesn't know how to analyze her own data.
I mean just look at this shit: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=4hwc6fwAAAAJ
This is a person that lives and breathes this kind of analysis every second of every day. To think you or I can come into her field and assume we know better than her and the peers in her field that reviewed her manuscript and approved it for a reputable journal is just nuts.

I'll just chime in real quick to say that you are in fact, very right about all of this.

P value is not "margin of error" it is a statistical test of a hypothesis. When the p value is greater than 0.05, that indicates that the results found would not be unsurprising if the null hypothesis were true. That fact is the very fact that the paper that I posted is highlighting: That there is no statistically significant difference between transgender (with social transitioning) and non-transgender populations in relation to certain highlighted factors. A confirmation of a null hypothesis is just a scientifically important as a confirmation of a hypothesis. 

The p-value has two tails.  It either has to be above .95 to validate the null hypothesis or below .05 to validate the alternate hypothesis.  Your study simply put isn't large enough to achieve either of the two goals.  All it's doing it stoking politics.  It's simply something for the news magazines to write about and claim they're right with.  It doesn't prove anything.  

The intention of posting a study like this is to show other scientists "interesting things" they may wanna perform larger studies on.  I don't even think this should be visible to the public as all it's doing is showing us some very early results.  

And @Torillian No one is claiming this scientist is a nut job.  I'm just stating that this isn't something you can shove at someone and say "this proves I'm right".  Because that's not what it's supposed to do.  Its meant for other researchers who wanna perform larger studies on transgenders.