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When explaining the meaning of a confidence interval don’t say “the probability that the parameter is in the interval is 0.95” because probability is a precious concept and this statement does not match the meaning of this term. Instead, say “We are 95% confident that the parameter is in the interval”.  Admittedly, I don’t know what people will make of the word “confident”. But I also don’t know what they will make of the word “probability”

If you live under the impression that in order to publish an empirical paper you must include the sentence “this holds with p-value x” for some number x<0.05 in your paper, here is a surprising bit of news for you: The editors of Basic and Applied Social Psychology have banned p-value from their journal, along with confidence intervals. In fact, according to the editorial, the state of the art of statistics “remains uncertain” so statistical inference is no longer welcome in their journal.

When I came across this editorial I was dumbfounded by the arrogance of the editors, who seem to know about statistics as much as I know about social psychology. But I haven’t heard about this journal until yesterday, and if I did I am pretty sure I wouldn’t believe anything they publish, p-value or no p-value. So I don’t have the right to complain here.

Here are somebodies who have the right to complain: The American Statistical Association. Concerned with the misuse, mistrust and misunderstanding of the p-value, ASA has recently issued a policy statement on p- values and statistical significance, intended for researchers who are not statisticians.

How do you explain p-value to practitioners who don’t care about things like Neyman-Pearson Lemma, independence and UMP tests ? First, you use language that obscures conceptual difficulties: “the probability that a statistical summary of the data would be equal to or more extreme than its observed value’’ — without saying what “more extreme’’ means. Second, you use warnings and slogans about what p-value doesn’t mean or can’t do, like “p-value does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result.’’

Among these slogans my favorite is


What’s cute about this statement is that it assumes that everybody understands what “there is 5% chance that the studied hypothesis is true” and that the notion of P-value is the one that is difficult to understand. In fact, the opposite is true.

Probability is conceptually tricky. It’s meaning is somewhat clear in a situation of a repeated experiment: I more or less understand what it means that a coin has 50% chance to land on Heads. (Yes. Only more or less). But without going full subjective I have no idea what is the meaning of the probability that a given hypothesis (boys who eat pickles in kindergarten have higher SAT score than girls who play firefighters) is true. On the other hand, The meaning of the corresponding P-value relies only on the conceptually simpler notion of probabilities in a repeated experiment.

Why therefore do the committee members (rightly !) assume that people are comfortable with the difficult concept of probability that an hypothesis is true and are uncomfortable with the easy concept of p-value ? I think the reason is that unlike the word “p-value”, the word “probability” is a word that we use in everyday life, so most people feel they know what it means. Since they have never thought about it formally, they are not aware that they actually don’t.

So here is a modest proposal for preventing the misuse and misunderstanding of statistical inference: Instead of saying “this hypothesis holds with p-value 0.03” say “We are 97% confident that this hypothesis holds”. We all  know what “confident” means right ?