The Problem With P-Hacking

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.—Mark TwainFew things excite me quite as much as when the topic of statistics rises to the prominence of news headlines. Recently, an academic at a certain institution came under harsh scrutiny when he was discovered to be clandestinely P-hacking.1 P-hacking is as deceitful as the term implies. It is the practice of analyzing and reanalyzing a dataset to cherry pick results.2 It levers a well-known and accepted statistical outcome, the P value, to shortcut the scientific method.

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