Why p-values are so hard to explain

Even scientists have trouble explaining, in plain English, what a p-value is, Christie Aschwanden writes after posing that challenge at a recent statistics conference: "To be clear, everyone I spoke with at METRICS could tell me the technical definition of a p-value — the probability of getting results at least as extreme as the ones you observed, given that the null hypothesis is correct — but almost no one could translate that into something easy to understand."

December 3, 2015

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