> A sincere thank you for the gentle corrections; I’ve taken them to heart, and you can be confident I will avoid such mischaracterizations in the future!
Why Randall should almost apologize for a comic is a mystery to me.
He's not apologizing for a comic -- he's apologizing for mischaracterzing people through his comic. He's not saying the point is wrong -- just that the labels are :)
I think it's a thoughtful, solidly nice and totally stand-up (and mature) thing for him to have done.
Yeah, the point is apparently just that unthinkingly accepting p = 0.05 as your cutoff for significance is moronic (this point is utterly uncontroversial among thinking humans), whereas the labels make it seem as if he's trying to say something about the controversy between frequentists and bayesians, which he didn't even know existed.
> (this point is utterly uncontroversial among thinking humans)
Are you sure about this? Most people don't know any statistics, and the vast majority of people who know some statistics never took it further than Stats 101. So a lot of people do blindly just apply p tests like this.
Randall's point about cancer statistics just serves to give a real world example of this, and why it's so important people better understand it.
Well, some people might, indeed, be educated stupid, though I hope to god no actual Stats 101 class teaches people that p < 0.05 = significant, other than as a convention that people might want to be aware of when they encounter the phrase "statistically significant".
I would be legitimately shocked if even a single doctor were willing to defend that p-test as in principle what it is for something to be statistically significant no matter what thing is at issue, rather than as a decent enough heuristic.
Nevertheless, the parenthetical you highlight is, indeed, probably literally false. I was employing a rhetorical device to convey the degree to which I found the point that, evidently, is the one Randall actually intended to be trivial.
I would be legitimately shocked if even a single doctor were willing to defend that p-test as in principle what it is for something to be statistically significant no matter what thing is at issue, rather than as a decent enough heuristic
Unless things have changed in the last twenty years, when I did a series of interviews with doctors about Bayesian probabilities in relation to an expert system project, you're going to be unpleasantly surprised at both the number who do - and the number who aren't really very sure what a p-test is at all...
I share your sensibilities. But I work with consumers of statistical analysis on a daily basis, and it is an unfortunately common to put stars next to parameters that are statistically significant at the 5% level. And many people treat that star or lack thereof as a very serious indication of whether the parameter is "meaningful."
I have even seen a slide presentation by consultants with a business practice of dropping all variables with p>.05, and re-estimating the model (doing this repeatedly until all variables have p>0.05).
The reliance on p-value thresholds is heartbreaking.
A sincere thank you for the gentle corrections; I’ve taken them to heart, and you can be confident I will avoid such mischaracterizations in the future!
Why Randall should almost apologize for a comic is a mystery to me.