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How a Cup of Tea Laid the Foundations for Modern Statistical Analysis
Scientific experiments run today are based on research practices that evolved out of a British tea-tasting experiment in the 1920s.
Even so, Fisher’s appeal for an open scientific mind was somewhat undermined by his insistence that researchers should use a 5 percent cutoff for a “significant” p-value, and his claim that he would “ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level.” Acrimony would give way to decades of ambiguity, as textbooks gradually muddled together Fisher’s null hypothesis testing with Neyman and Pearson’s decision-based approach. In some of our public-facing epidemiological analysis, my colleagues and I have therefore chosen to report only the confidence intervals, to avoid misplaced attention falling on specific values.
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