2014-12-25
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a single panel with the caption: "Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson was born before modern social science." Jefferson is depicted writing on a document with a quill pen, but instead of the famous Declaration of Independence phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident," he has written: "We hold these truths to be statistically significant. (p<0.01)"
The Humor
The joke replaces the grand, philosophical language of the Declaration of Independence with the dry, technical language of modern empirical research. "Self-evident" truths -- meaning truths that are obvious and require no proof -- are replaced by "statistically significant" truths with a p-value threshold, meaning truths that have been demonstrated through data analysis to be unlikely to have occurred by chance. The humor lies in the contrast between the soaring rhetoric of Enlightenment philosophy and the cautious, hedged language of modern social science. It also implies that if Jefferson had been born in the modern era, the Declaration would have read less like an inspiring manifesto and more like an academic paper -- technically more rigorous, but far less stirring.
References
- Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence (1776): The original text reads "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." -- one of the most famous sentences in American political history.
- Statistical significance and p-values: In modern social science, a p-value below 0.05 (or the stricter threshold of 0.01 shown here) indicates that a result is unlikely to be due to random chance. The use of p<0.01 is a particularly strict standard, adding to the humor of Jefferson being overly cautious.