I appreciate Tim's comments. I myself have a "social science" paper coming out soon in which I felt forced to use p-values, given their ubiquity. However, I also told readers of the paper that confidence intervals are much more informative and I do provide them. As I said earlier, there is no avoiding that, and R needs to report p-values for that reason.
Instead, the question is what to do about the stars; I proposed eliminating them altogether. Star-crazed users know how to determine them themselves from the p-values, but deleting them from R would send a message. I did say my proposal was "bold," which really meant I was suggesting that R do SOMETHING to send that message, not necessarily star elimination. One such "something" would be the proposal I made, which would be to add confidence intervals to the output. This too could be just an option, but again offering that option would send a message. Indeed, I would suggest that the help page explain that confidence intervals are more informative. (The help page could make a similar statement regarding the stars.) When I pitch R to people, I say that in addition to the large function and library base and the nice graphics capabilities, R is above all Statistically Correct--it's written by statisticians who know what they are doing, rather than some programmer simply implementing a formula from a textbook. I know that a lot of people feel this is one of R's biggest strengths. Given that, one might argue that R should do what it can to help users engage in good statistical practice. I think this was Frank's point. Norm ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
