{"id":31,"date":"2007-10-16T01:42:20","date_gmt":"2007-10-16T05:42:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/2007\/10\/statistical-laws\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T13:29:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T20:29:08","slug":"statistical-laws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/2007\/10\/statistical-laws\/","title":{"rendered":"Statistical Laws"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was clearing out some old files in my office this weekend when I came across a collection of notes from my early years in grad school.  One set was from a graduate statistics course taught by my current advisor, George Wolford.  On the last day of the course his goal was to give us a set of key principles to guide our future endeavors.  He listed eight statments by Robert Abelson, author of <em>Statistics as Principled Argument<\/em>, and also listed the eight statements that he lives by.  I replicate the text below, as they continue to be valid and useful.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_P._Abelson\">Robert Abelson&#8217;s<\/a> Laws:<br \/>\n1. Chance is lumpy<br \/>\n2. Overconfidence abhors uncertainty<br \/>\n3. Never flout a convention just once<br \/>\n4. Don&#8217;t talk greek if you don&#8217;t know the english translation<br \/>\n5. If you don&#8217;t have anything to say, don&#8217;t say anything<br \/>\n6. There is no free hunch<br \/>\n7. You can&#8217;t see the dust if you don&#8217;t move the couch<br \/>\n8. Criticism is the mother of methodology<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dartmouth.edu\/~psych\/people\/faculty\/wolford.html\">George Wolford&#8217;s<\/a> Laws:<br \/>\n1. Chance is lumpy<br \/>\n2. Think about the dependent measure<br \/>\n3. Fit the design and analysis to the question<br \/>\n4. Look at the raw data<br \/>\n5. Use error bars and measures of effect size<br \/>\n6. State hypothesis a priori and test as such<br \/>\n7. Protect Type I error in every way possible<br \/>\n8. Do simplest appropriate test<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was clearing out some old files in my office this weekend when I came across a collection of notes from my early years in grad school. One set was from a graduate statistics course taught by my current advisor, George Wolford. On the last day of the course his goal was to give us [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1575,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/1575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}