On Hypothesis Testing II

"Small wonder that students have trouble [with statistical hypothesis testing]. They may be trying to think." (W Edwards Deming, "On probability as a basis for action", American Statistician 29, 1975)

"Tests appear to many users to be a simple way to discharge the obligation to provide some statistical treatment of the data." (H V Roberts, "For what use are tests of hypotheses and tests of significance",  Communications in Statistics [Series A], 1976)

"In practice, of course, tests of significance are not taken seriously." (Louis Guttman, "The illogic of statistical inference for cumulative science", Applied Stochastic Models and Data Analysis, 1985)

"Most readers of The American Statistician will recognize the limited value of hypothesis testing in the science of statistics. I am not sure that they all realize the extent to which it has become the primary tool in the religion of Statistics." (David Salsburg, The Religion of Statistics as Practiced in Medical Journals, "The American Statistician" 39, 1985)

"Since a point hypothesis is not to be expected in practice to be exactly true, but only approximate, a proper test of significance should almost always show significance for large enough samples. So the whole game of testing point hypotheses, power analysis notwithstanding, is but a mathematical game without empirical importance." (Louis Guttman, "The illogic of statistical inference for cumulative science", Applied Stochastic Models and Data Analysis, 1985

"We shall marshal arguments against [significance] testing, leading to the conclusion that it be abandoned by all substantive science and not just by educational research and other social sciences which have begun to raise voices against the virtual tyranny of this branch of inference in the academic world." (Louis Guttman, "The illogic of statistical inference for cumulative science", Applied Stochastic Models and Data Analysis, 1985)

"Analysis of variance [...] stems from a hypothesis-testing formulation that is difficult to take seriously and would be of limited value for making final conclusions." (Herman Chernoff, Comment,  The American Statistician 40(1), 1986)

"We are better off abandoning the use of hypothesis tests entirely and concentrating on developing continuous measures of toxicity which can be used for estimation." (David Salsburg, "Statistics for Toxicologists", 1986)

"Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion." (Stephen M Stigler, "Neutral Models in Biology", 1987)