ASA’s statement on p-values

 

Last night I received an email from the ASA signed by Jessica Utts and Ron Wasserstein with the following sentence

“Widespread use of ‘statistical significance’ (generally interpreted as ‘p

In short, we envision a new era, in which the broad scientific community recognizes what statisticians have been advocating for many years. In this “post p

Is such an era beyond reach? We think not, but we need your help in making sure this opportunity is not lost.”

which is obviously missing important bits. The email was pointing out a free access American Statistician article warning about the misuses and over-interpretations of p-values. Which contains rather basic “principles” that p-values are not probabilities that the null is true, that there is no golden level against which to compare the p-value, that nominal p-values may be far from actual p-values, that they do not provide a measure of evidence per se, &tc. As written in the conclusion, “Nothing in the ASA statement is new”. But, besides calling for caution and the cumulative use of different assessments of evidence, this statement may leave the non-statistician completely nonplussed about how to proceed when testing hypotheses or comparing models. And make the decision of Basic and Applied Social Psychology of rejecting all arguments based on p-values sound sensible.

Incidentally, the article contains the completion of the first sentence [in red below], if not of the second:

“Widespread use of ‘statistical significance’ (generally interpreted as ‘p≤ 0.05”) as a license for making a claim of a scientific finding (or implied truth) leads to considerable distortion of the scientific process.“