[eganist]

The words "deceivingly" and "deceptively" have the same problem: there's a roughly 50/50 split in polar-opposite interpretations. https://grammarist.com/usage/deceptively/

In this case, does "deceivingly robust" mean they look robust but are fragile? or does it instead mean they look fragile but are robust?

This isn't a criticism of you, soundsop. Rather, it's intended to keep pointing at how difficult it can be to concisely deliver a message.

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edit: sounds like the correct interpretation of the title is "P-hacked hypotheses appear more robust than they are."

[comex]

Huh. I'm skeptical about that article's dichotomy of "deceptively" meaning either "in appearance but not in reality" or "in reality but not in appearance". I think the most common usage of "deceptively X" is, more broadly, "X in a way that deceives you". That includes "X in reality but not in appearance", but it also includes "X in reality and in appearance, but deceiving you about something else".

For example, they used this quote as an example of "in appearance but not in reality":

> It’s no mystery why images of shocking, unremitting violence spring to mind when one hears the deceptively simple term, “D-Day.” [Life]

But the term "D-Day" is simple. It's deceptive because it might wrongly lead you to think the event it refers to is also simple.

Similarly, if something is "deceptively simple-looking", it really is simple-looking; it's just not simple.

[eganist]

Mate, I don't know; I'm just going with all the research and linguistic warnings I've read on the word.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3500

https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/25/deceptively/

https://www.academia.edu/37488247/The_Deceptively_Simple_Pro...

Shoot, even oxford gives exactly opposite definitions of the word.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...

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I mean, even when I saw the title of the thread, I had an obligation to click (clickbait I guess?) because I could have interpreted the title as either a warning about p-hacking or an attestation in favor of the practice. In fact, on first glance, I read the title as "P-hacked hypotheses appear less robust than they actually are."

[agravier]

I think that the correct interpretation is: Statistical robustness tests do not address the problem of p-hacked hypotheses.

[eganist]

You'd be right, and that's a sentence about halfway down. And should you decide to perform robustness tests on a p-hacked hypothesis, you might be convinced that it's more robust than it is.

[rhizome]

Eh, I don't think it's difficult so much as a situation where the writer did not weed out ambiguity for some reason. The fix is simply to use different words, especially since there's nothing particularly technical about this to constrain word choice.

[ebg13]

The problem in the title is not the word "deceivingly" but the word "are". It should say "appear" or "seem". The reason is the common understanding of the word "robust" to mean the strong end of the spectrum from weak to strong and not the entire spectrum itself. The only way for the title to work is if you use the other (wrong) meaning of "robust".