The cult of statistical significance
by Stephen Thomas Ziliak, Deirdre N. McCloskey · first published 2008
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Another report from the struggle to dethrone Fisherite statistical-significance tests as a measure of the quality and importance of experimental results.
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…a statistician, I have a keen awareness of the ways that p-values can depart from truth. You can see Optimizely's effort to cope (https://www.optimizely.com/statistics). You can read about it in The Cult of Statistical Significance (http://www.amazon.com/The-Cult-Statistical-Significance-Econ...). This Economist video captures it solidly (http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-c...). The key component missing…
on “Science’s Biggest Fail” ↗The field receives a pretty scathing review in The Cult of Statistical Significance. The summaries offered there are pretty damning: http://www.amazon.com/The-Cult-Statistical-Significance-Econ...
on “Facebook experiments had few limits” ↗I just finished a pretty interesting book on this topic: "The Cult Of Statistical Significance": http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Statistical-Significance-Economic... It basically goes through a bunch of examples, mostly in Economics, but in medicine also (Vioxx) where statistical significance has…
on “P-Values are not Error Probabilities (2003) [pdf]” ↗There has been plenty of debate about this in other fields as well. Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak have a particularly well-written paper titled "The Cult of Statistical Significance" on this very topic. Their main point is that statistical significance is meaningless without a discussion of magnitudes. [1] http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf
on “Scientists Perturbed by Loss of Stat Tool to Sift Research Fudge from Fact” ↗Yes, if you read further on the blog, you'll see I'm more than slightly denigrating. I read a book recently called The Cult of Statistical Significance and it's really turned me against Fisher. Not only do I see his methods as sub-standard to Bayesian analysis, he was really mean and disparaging himself to those folks. It's interesting, my username…
on “Goodbye R scripts, hello R packages” ↗I would highly recommend that anyone with further interest check out the book, "The Cult of Statistical Significance" It's eye opening.
on “Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity” ↗