One of these days I am going to finish my series on problems with how NHST is issued in the social sciences. Until then, I came up with a cheap criticism of p-values today.
To make sense of my complaint, you’ll want to head over to Andy Gelman’s blog and read the comments on his recent blog post about p-values. Reading them makes one thing clear: not even a large group of stats wonks can agree on how to think about p-values. How could we ever hope for understanding from the kind of people who are only reporting p-values because they’re forced to do so by their fields?
I totally agree with the post, and I think we should educate people to stop abusing summary statistics such as mean and P-value.
NOTE: It’s Andrew Gelman.
Cheers,
Man, you read my mind exactly. It’s like a Rorschach test over there.