While hanging out at Columbia the past couple of years, i was comforted to realize that i wasn’t alone in my lack of enthusiasm for p-values. In fact, while some folks in some disciplines are completely infatuated with them, did you know there are others out there that dismiss them? i mean, entirely!? [removes tongue from cheek]
While it might be an overstatement to suggest that the variety of headlines that accompanied the news of the HIV vaccine trial in Thailand claimed that “AIDS is now a disease of the past,” it really wouldn’t be stretching the tone of some of those headlines too far. Some people really did seem to think this was the breakthrough we’d been waiting for. That is, those people who focused solely on the p-values. E.g., from one of the NYT pieces on it “Although the difference was a mere 23 people…it was statistically significant.”
But what most people seemed to fail to pick up on was the very next part of that sentence – Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by jimi adams 
Permutations 