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Science is judgment, not only calculation: a reply to Aris Spanos's review of The cult of statistical significance .

Over the past century the usual (and the conveniently mechanical) procedure devised by the great statistician, geneticist, and racial eugenicist R. A. Fisher has been shown to be scientifically silly again and again and again. Rarely has anyone actually defended NHST (null hypothesis significance testing). That is because it is logically indefensible. Statistical significance is neither necessary nor sufficient for substantive scientific significance. Everyone knows this, once they stop regressing for a minute and actually think. We have noticed two peculiar features of the rare defenses, exhibited in Aris Spanos’s (2008) review. For one thing, when mounted by people sophisticated in statistics, such as Spanos, or his allies Kevin Hoover and Mark Siegler (2008), the defenses are never defenses. They begin on the first page by admitting that NHST does not give mechanical assurances that its alleged findings are scientifically important. Spanos acknowledges the salience of this “long-standing problem of statistical vs. substantive significance”. It is certainly “long-standing”—the error of mixing one with the other, as we show, dates to the foundation of the journal Biometrika , in 1901. Unhappily, though, and every time, the defenders promptly lose sight of their concession. On the second page they re-assert, as for example both Spanos and Hoover/Siegler do, that NHST offers the scientist a way of making a scientific judgment without regard to what is persuasive to other scientists. For another thing, the defenders are always angry. Ignorant sneering, personal insult, and irrelevant indignation are judged acceptable when defending NHST. We think the anger comes from a psychological tension. The defenders realize uneasily that it is strange to depend for scientific judgment on a sampling statistic without a persuasive context—failing to ask how big is big, which is the only scientific context relevant to a real scientific test. But they have been thoroughly