i_phish_cats
Joined 8 years ago
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Joined 8 years ago
The problem is that with all its problems, statistical significance provides one major advantage over more meaningful methods: it provides pre-canned tests and a number (.05, .01, etc) that you need to 'beat'. The pre-canned-ness/standardization provides benchmarks for publication.
I once worked in a computational genomics lab. We got a paper into PNAS by running fisher-exact test on huge (N=100000+) dataset, ranked the p-values, got the lowest p-values, and reported those as findings. There's so much wrong with that procedure its not even funny.