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Monday, November 22, 2021

A confusing tweet on (not) transforming data keeps reappearing on the internet

I keep seeing this misleading comment on the internet over and over again:

Gelman is cited above, but Gelman himself has spoken out on this point and directly contradicts the above tweet: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/21/you-should-usually-log-transform-your-positive-data/
Even the quoted part from the Gelman and Hill 2007 book is highly misleading because it is most definitely not about null hypothesis significance testing.
Non-normality is relatively unimportant in statistical data analysis the same way that a cricket ball is relatively unimportant in a cricket match. The players, the pitch, the bat, are much more important, but everyone would look pretty silly on the cricket field without that ball.
I guess if we really, really need a slogan to be able to do data analysis, it should be what one should call the MAM principle: model assumptions matter.

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