The addition of significant stars was, in my opinion, one of the worst defaults
ever added
to R. I would be delighted to see it removed, or at least change the default.
It is one
of the few overrides that I have argued to add to our site-wide defaults file.
My bias comes from 30+ years in a medical statistics career where fighting the
disease of
"dichotomania" has been an eternal struggle. Continuous covariates are split
in two,
nuanced risk scores are thresholded, decisions become yes/no, .... Adding
stars to
output is, to me, simply a gateway drug to this pernicous addiction. We
shouldn't
encourage it.
Wrt Abe's rant about the Nature article: I've read the article and found it to
be well
reasoned, and I can't say the same about the rant. The issue in biomedical
science is
that the p-value has fallen victim to Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a
target, it
ceases to be a good measure." The article argues, and I would agree, that the
.05 yes/no
decision rule is currently doing more harm than good in biomedical research.
What to do
instead of this is a tough question, but it is fairly clear that the current
plan isn't
working. I have seen many cases of two papers which both found a risk
increase of 1.9
for something where one paper claimed "smoking gun" and the other "completely
exonerated". Do YOU want to take a drug with 2x risk and a p= 0.2 'proof'
that it is
okay? Of course, if there is too much to do and too little time, people will
find a way
to create a shortcut yes/no rule no matter what we preach. (We statisticians
will do it
too.)
Terry T.
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