Lakeland Times: "Autism numbers spike: The latest call to action" (Stern quoted)

A great point about this was made about a decade ago by Andrew Gelman, a professor in the Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science at Columbia University, and Hal Stern, a professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Irvine, in their wonderfully titled article “The Difference Between ‘Significant’ and ‘Not Significant’ is not itself Statistically Significant.”

In their discussion, Gelman and Stern touch on the growing awareness that “statistical significance is not the same as practical importance,” and “that dichotomization into significant and nonsignificant results encourages the dismissal of observed differences in favor of the usually less interesting null hypothesis of no difference, and that any particular threshold for declaring significance is arbitrary.”

Read the full story at The Lakeland Times.