You aren't by any chance a physicist or something, are you? :) 95% confidence is just about the lowest that a scientist in any field would think about publishi

You aren't by any chance a physicist or something, are you? :) 95% confidence is just about the lowest that a scientist in any field would think about publishing with, but in many fields- especially those whose subjects are the delicate and high-variance animals known as humans- statistical confidence is expensive. It wouldn't surprise me that lots of papers are put out that just barely reach the lowest standards of evidence, because grant-funded researchers couldn't afford the 1000 more test subjects it would take to get another sigma. Which isn't great, but strictly speaking its not doing society a disservice, either- even uncertain knowledge decreases the entropy of our vast ignorance. It does, however, add an important dimension to how these studies should be interpreted- that small chance that any given study is incorrect matters, particularly when there's such a mind-bogglingly huge amount of research being done in the modern day. Its entirely unsurprising to read about a study claiming with p < 0.01 that a glass of wine a day will make your hair fall out, when you consider that there's been many thousands of papers published about things like wine. Confidence- and p-values alone aren't going to save us there.