“Check out table 4.”

A colleague sent along this article and writes:

Check out table 4. this is ERC funded research (the very best of European science get this money).

OK, now I was curious, so I scrolled through to table 4. Here it is:

Yup, it’s horrible. I don’t know that I’d call it cargo cult science at its absolute worst, but it’s pretty bad.

(The full story, for those who are not familiar, is that p-values are super-noisy—see, for example, the first full paragraph on page 5 of this article, hence summarizing a study by statistically significant p-values is a criminally wasteful presentation of results.)