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I gave a relevant talk a few years ago: How to Kill Your Grandmother with Statistics[1].

The authors are spot on that the problem is not p-values per se but dichotomous thinking. People want a magic truth box that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately there are a ton of people in the world who continue to make money off of pretending that it does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRpAHS5_hDk

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I like your statement "there is no such thing as a truth machine". But your talk as this article seem to allude that the world would be better off if we just dropped significance testing. AKA dropping the objectivity of science. My guess would be that in that world there would be many more talks about how we need to introduce some kind of objective test to prevent all these drugs from getting to market that were subjectively accepted.

This resonates with common social problems we're all familiar with: People like stereotyping because it's a way to categorize humans without having to think too hard about their differences.

To me the issue stems from an even deeper fear of uncertainty. It takes a rock-solid psyche to be comfortable with the idea that we know little and a lot of our science would have a tough time standing up to statistical analyses.

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