我以前曾想办个刊物就叫 Journal of Insignificance 专门发表不显著的结果。刚放狗搜了一下,还真有人这么干:https://www.jasnh.com
这里有一篇古早文章讲这个 0.05 的来历。
It turns out that Francis Edgeworth, who introduced "significant" in statistics, and Karl Pearson, who popularized it in statistics, used it differently than we do. For Edgeworth and Pearson, "being significant" meant "signifying". An observed difference was significant if it signified a real difference, and you needed a very small p-value to be sure of this. A p-value of 5% meant that the observed difference might be significant, not that it definitely was.
我的理解是,小的 P 值只是故事的开始(即“这里也许有值得深入研究的东西哦”),而常见的误解是它是故事的结束(即“终于实锤了、可以发表、走人了”)。此刻我的脑洞里回响起契诃夫的一篇短篇小说《遛小狗的女人》的结尾:
似乎片刻之后,答案就能找到,到那时候,就会开始一种崭新的、美好的生活,不过两个人心里都明白:离终点还十分遥远,最复杂、最坎坷的道路现在刚刚开始。