The cult of statistical significance: how the standard error costs us jobs, justice, and lives

Statistical significance, a technique that dominates medicine, economics, psychology, and many other scientific fields, has been a huge mistake. The outcome is a case study in bad science - how it originates and how it grows. These sciences, from agronomy to zoology, the authors find, engage that doesn't test and estimating that doesn't estimate. Heedless of magnitude and of a genuine engagement with alternative hypotheses, they testimate. Null hypothesis significance testing is in other words a scientific train-wreck, about which a small group of statisticians have been warning for a century.Ziliak and McCloskey's book shows field by field how the wreck happened, reports on the fatalities, and offers a…