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The 20% Statistician
Personal blog · daniellakens.blogspot.comsciencedata
The 20% Statistician is a personal blog at daniellakens.blogspot.com about science and data. Since 2014, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Impossibly Hungry Judges (2017)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Daniel Lakens's posts on the 'impossibly hungry judges' effect size, p-values and Bayesian analysis, usually to argue that the original study's effect is implausible.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog on statistics, methods, philosophy of science, and open science. Understanding 20% of statistics will improve 80% of your inferences.
Most-linked posts?
- /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-08-04
- Impossibly Hungry Judges (2017)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-08-16
- /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html?m=12 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-15
What Hacker News says?
http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-j...
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html?m=1
on “Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study”Submitted Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality than journal articles as a story · 233 points
HN discussionExcessively large effect sizes are a warning sign in and of themselves. A good article on this is here: [0] -- simply if the effect is too huge, it becomes incumbent on the researcher to explain why no-one has noticed this before. Methane is a gas with a distinct and noticeable smell. Seaweed is plentiful in many places cows are kept. If the effect was really as dramatic as claimed you'd expect that it'd be well kno…
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html
on “Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%”Submitted Which Data Repository Should You Use? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYes: https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833 https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-...
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html
on “Physical attractiveness bias in the legal system (2017)”Submitted The Null Is Always False (Except When It Is True) (2014) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe hungry judge effect hasn't replicated well. For example, https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/... , and a few years ago it was pointed out that the actual effect in the original paper seems too large and precise to be true: https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-...
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html
on “I criticized Amazon’s policies in a blog. Their lawyers are trying to ruin me”Submitted Understanding common misconceptions about p-values as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe thing is, just because you can prove there’s a correlation, doesn’t mean you’ve figured out the actual cause. Like the Flying Spaghetti Monster doctrine of piracy and global warming. And this one they discussed elsewhere in the thread: http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-j... http://sparrowism.soc.srcf.net/home/graph.png
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html
on “The claimed effect size is about a zillion times higher than is plausible”Submitted Negotiations between Elsevier and Dutch Universities break down as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere was another article related to this study that hit the HN front page. It talked about the size of effect, and argued that the effect size was ridiculously big, and if true, we should see giant spikes in car crashes around lunch, big enough for common sense to ban driving just before noon. I think you'll enjoy the read. > If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall…
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html
on “The irrational hungry judge effect revisited (2023)”Submitted Impossibly Hungry Judges (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNone of it. https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-... The original effect was known to be spurious on publication.
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html
on “The irrational hungry judge effect revisited (2023)”Submitted The New Heuristics (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionLook at Bem's studies. They highlight this phenomenon clearly. Even meta studies can't prove things. http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2015/04/why-meta-analysis-o...
Comment linking /2015/04/why-meta-analysis-of-90-precognition.html?m=1
on “Impossibly Hungry Judges”Submitted The New Heuristics (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI don't think it's an issue of old versus new methods. Daniel Lakens has an great string of blog posts / publications on how a lot of the same things can go wrong with Bayesian anaylses [1], and how p-values can be viewed as a "poor man's Bayesian updating function" [2]. [1]: http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/03/no-p-values-are-not... [2]: https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-relation-betwe...
Comment linking /2015/11/the-relation-between-p-values-and.html
on “Bayesian analysis of ego-depletion studies favours null hypothesis”Submitted I tried to get a paper that I own retracted as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis guy doesn't think it's real https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-...
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html
on “Just putting it out there”Submitted Verisimilitude, Belief, and Progress in Psychological Science as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere is one: http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-j...
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html
on “Availability of cookies affects evaluation of teaching (2018)”Submitted A meta-analysis of 90 precognition studies is not convincing evidence for effect as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI have always found this response to the hungry judges study much more compelling than the study itself: http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-j... > […] I want to take a different approach in this blog. I think we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should b…
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html?m=1
on “Hunger shifts attention towards less healthy food options, study finds”1. The study you link is the famous one about judges. It doesn't mention juries, nor are juries involved in the study. 2. Whether or not people have had lunch is not the biggest factor in outcomes. The most important thing you can read about this study is Daniel Lakens' commentary: > I appreciate that people have tried to think about which mechanism could cause this effect, and if you are interested, highly recommen…
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html
on “Cellebrite asks cops to keep its phone hacking tech ‘hush hush’”Per https://www.gleech.org/psych : - Stanford Prison Experiment; Not an experiment, abuse was scripted, experimenter constantly intervened, reactions of participants were faked, and there was not even a scientific hypothesis they were testing. Definitely read the paper[0] debunking it. - Milgram Experiment: (the one where people were ordered to shock actors) No good evidence for it. Researchers did not follow script…
Comment linking /2017/07/impossibly-hungry-judges.html
on “Harvard ethics prof fabricated multiple behavioral science studies”Interesting article! It seems like they were very careful about using simple, approachable language, which seems huge in helping people loosen their kung-fu grip on p-values. One of their sections, "P-values are not posterior probabilities", reminded me of an interesting blog post by Daniel Lakens about the opposite, "The relation between p-values and the probability H0 is true is not weak enough to ban p-values": h…
Comment linking /2015/11/the-relation-between-p-values-and.html
on “The Statistical Crisis in Science: The Cult of 'P' [pdf]”
