Re: promoting healthy skepticism in the news: helping journalists get it right.

摘要

Dr Lash et al. (1) raise an important issue about the use and misuse of the P value in their critique of the recent editorial on "helping journalists to get it right" (2). The misinterpretation of the P value has been discussed by others and me in the pages of the Journal before (3). In their reply, Schwartz et al. defend the definition provided in the editorial by stating that they "were not convinced that working journalists would find these [strict] definitions user-friendly, so we sacrificed precision for utility." A user-friendly definition that is wrong and leads to the wrong interpretation of data has no utility.