Hello,

I'm following up on a thread from 7 years ago (Mar 2019) where there are 
several arguments -- some of them passionate -- for and against having the 
'show.signif.stars' option default to TRUE. You can look back in the archives 
(https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/) under "default for 'signif.stars'", 
starting 27 March 2019 to see what was said. You may also want to look at the 
"Regression stars" thread initiated by Frank Harrell starting 7 Feb 2013.

Clearly, there is a long-standing debate on this issue. I'm writing to suggest 
a more modest response than changing the default for 'show.signif.stars': 
Instead, consider making 'show.signif.stars' a configuration option along with 
'papersize' and others that some users will want to change. The default 
.Rprofile script starts with "# Things you might want to change" - and it could 
be added there. I think this file is initialized with some modal dialogs in a 
new installation of R, and it would be good to add it there too.

Why do this? Because there are a lot of users out there who strongly object to 
significance stars, just like there are a lot of people who use letter-sized 
paper. They are your colleagues, even though you may disagree with them; and it 
gives them a more visible way of not having those asterisks cluttering their 
results.

Thanks

Russ Lenth
Professor Emeritus
University of Iowa, USA

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