In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Thom Baguley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> You can get important significant effects, unimportant significant
> effects, important non-significant effects and unimportant
> non-significant effects.
I'll go for three out of four of these. But "important non-significant
effects"?
That would be like saying "I think the benefits of this drug are large
enough to be important, even though I'm not convinced that it has any
benefit at all".
Of course, real conclusions are not black-and-white. We might not be
convinced that the drug has an effect, but the benefit if it does
might be so large that we'll use it on the off-chance that it does
have an effect. But if you're using the black-and-white language of
"significant" versus "not significant", it makes no sense to say that
an effect is "important but not significant".
Radford Neal
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Radford M. Neal [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Statistics and Dept. of Computer Science [EMAIL PROTECTED]
University of Toronto http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=================================================================
Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about
the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
=================================================================
