The Null Hypothesis Loves You and Wants You To Be Happy
Relaxing the null hypothesis makes for great storytelling, but it’s an unsettling way to live. Which information and which perspectives we take into account, when we try to decide whether a pattern we’ve matched is real or an apophenic false alarm, affects our ability to determine whether something has gone away or whether we’ve just stopped believing in it. In the praxis of science we try to keep the false alarm rate down with things like study size and statistical inference and meta-analyses and replication, and we still get it wrong a lot.
https://medium.com/@maradydd/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-and-wants-you-to-be-happy–3189413d8cd0