Prof David Colquhoun | Why p-values can't tell you what you need to know and what to do about it

About the speaker

Professor David Colquhoun is a pharmacologist notable for his insights into the biophysics of drug–receptor interactions of single ion channels. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1985, was awarded the Humboldt Prize in 1990 and made Honorary Fellow of UCL in 2004. Colquhoun joined the Pharmacology Department at UCL in 1964, and, apart from 9 years, has remained there ever since. He can be found on twitter (@david_colquhoun) and via his website DC’s Improbable Science, where he writes critically about pseudoscience and alternative medicine.


About the talk

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the literature has too many false positives. One reason, among many, for this is misunderstanding of p-values. There are three main reasons why a p-value can’t tell you much about whether a hypothesis is true or not. It transposes the conditional, It has the wrong denominator. It takes into account values that have not been observed. These will be explained, and suggestions made about possible solutions.


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