Le Monde and the replication crisis

An rather poor coverage of the latest article in Science on the replication crisis in psychology in Le Monde Sciences & Medicine weekly pages (and mentioned a few days ago on Andrew’s blog, with the terrific if unrelated poster for Blade Runner…):

L’étude repose également sur le rôle d’un critère très critiqué, la “valeur p”, qui est un indicateur statistique estimant la probabilité que l’effet soit bien significatif.

As you may guess from the above (pardon my French!), the author of this summary of the Science article (a) has never heard of a p-value (which translates as niveau de signification in French statistics books) and (b) confuses the probability of exceeding the observed quantity under the null with the probability of the alternative. The remainder of the paper is more classical, pointing out the need for preregistered protocols in experimental sciences. Even though it mostly states evidence, like the decrease in significant effects for prepublished protocols. Apart from this mostly useless entry, rather interesting snapshots in the issue: Stephen Hawking’s views on how information could escape a black hole, an IBM software for predicting schizophrenia, Parkinson disease as a result of hyperactive neurons, diseased Formica fusca ants taking some harmful drugs to heal, …