The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives Book

Contents Preface....................xv
Acknowledgments....................xix
A Significant Problem....................1
1. Dieting "Significance" and the Case of Vioxx....................23
2. The Sizeless Stare of Statistical Significance....................33
3. What the Sizeless Scientists Say in Defense....................42
4. Better Practice: s-Importance vs. {alpha}-"Significance"....................57
5. A Lot Can Go Wrong in the Use of Significance Tests in Economics....................62
6. A Lot Did Go Wrong in the American Economic Review during the 1980s....................74
7. Is Economic Practice Improving?....................79
8. How Big Is Big in Economics?....................89
9. What the Sizeless Stare Costs, Economically Speaking....................98
10. How Economics Stays That Way: The Textbooks and the Referees....................106
11. The Not-Boring Rise of Significance in Psychology....................123
12. Psychometrics Lacks Power....................131
13. The Psychology of Psychological Significance Testing....................140
14. Medicine Seeks a Magic Pill....................154
15. Rothman's Revolt....................165
16. On Drugs, Disability, and Death....................176
17. Edgeworth's Significance....................187
18. "Take 3[sigma] as Definitely Significant": Pearson's Rule....................193
19. Who Sits on the Egg of Cuculus Canorus? Not Karl Pearson....................203
20. Gosset: The Fable of the Bee....................207
21. Fisher: The Fable of the Wasp....................214
22. How the Wasp Stung the Bee and Tookover Some Sciences....................227
23. Eighty Years of Trained Incapacity: How Such a Thing Could Happen 238 24. What to Do....................245
A Reader's Guide....................253
Notes....................255
Works Cited....................265
Index....................289