The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs US Jobs, Justice, And Lives‪.‬

The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2008, 3,52 pp. How do many scientific disciplines estimate and report results? Practitioners estimate regression models or conduct difference-of-means tests through experiments. And they report which results are significant and which are not (i.e., different from zero with 95 percent confidence). In this important book, Ziliak and McCloskey have three objectives: to remind us that such research may be mindless, unscientific, and costly; to explicate the intellectual history of significance testing and the straggles among those professors who developed sampling and statistical testing; and to illustrate the correct way to conduct research and praise those few who report their research properly.