Another look at the call to abandon statistical significance

What’s hot? What’s not?/Niklas Bildhauer, Wikimedia

Abandoning it certainly wouldn’t be easy because so much prior research is built around it.

More than 800 statisticians and scientists are calling for an end to judging studies by statistical significance in a March 20 comment published in Nature. An accompanying March 20 special issue of the American Statistician makes the manifesto crystal clear in its introduction: “‘statistically significant’ — don’t say it and don’t use it.”

There is good reason to want to scrap statistical significance. But with so much research now built around the concept, it’s unclear how — or with what other measures — the scientific community could replace it. The American Statistician offers a full 43 articles exploring what scientific life might look like without this measure in the mix.Bethany Brookshire, “Statisticians want to abandon science’s standard measure of ‘significance’” at Science News

In an era where even medical journals are urged to get woke, abandoning statistical significance could mean abandoning a refuge against Correct nonsense. As Brookshire writes, “Unfortunately, there is no single alternative that everyone agrees would be better for all experiments.” But that might just be what some factions want and need.

Maybe science is over and there is a war for the cultural spoils.

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See also: Pushback against abandoning statistical significance in science

When medical journals get woke… They fight racism, not cancer. We hope no one facing a difficult diagnosis has to listen to someone whose basic mission in life sounds like dumping on herself instead of serving others. .

and

Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.

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