"Richard M. Barton" wrote:
>
> --- Radford Neal wrote:
> 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".
Roughly: and if you agree that "convinced" is stronger than "think"
there is no contradiction here. My guess is that early in the
development of new drugs this is often an accurate description of the
researcher's attitude, and the correct response is to do more research.
However, a better phrasing might be
"I think the benefits of this drug _might_turn_out_to_be_ large
enough to be important, even though I'm not _yet_ convinced that it has
any benefit at all".
In other words, a reasonable interval estimate for the effect size
contains some values of interest and we need more data. (We do need
some other evidence that these values are plausible, of course; we
cannot go haring off after every conjecture we can't disprove!)
-Robert Dawson
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