When news came from the Large Hadron Collider that physicists had discovered evidence for the Higgs boson, a long-theorized fundamental particle, every article tried to quote a probability: “There’s only a 1 in 1.74 million chance that this result is a fluke,” or something along those lines. But every news source quoted a different number. Not only did they ignore the base rate and misinterpret the p value, but they couldn’t calculate it correctly either.
