Re:Statisticians want to abandon science’s standard measure ...
by kerkeslager on Friday September 06, 2019 @11:15AM
(#20896371)
This is a really good point.
In fact, failures to reproduce "landmark" experiments have low significance (statistics word) because they find a result that is highly probable if the null hypothesis is true. But failures to reproduce have high significance (colloquial English word) because they indicate that widely-held beliefs are wrong. So in some of the most important cases, the statistics and colloquial English meanings of the words are exactly the opposite.
I don't know if there's a good solution to this, though--it's hard to change organically-emergent trends in language even if we did come up with a better term.
In fact, failures to reproduce "landmark" experiments have low significance (statistics word) because they find a result that is highly probable if the null hypothesis is true. But failures to reproduce have high significance (colloquial English word) because they indicate that widely-held beliefs are wrong. So in some of the most important cases, the statistics and colloquial English meanings of the words are exactly the opposite.
I don't know if there's a good solution to this, though--it's hard to change organically-emergent trends in language even if we did come up with a better term.