But that's exactly my point: we still are groping around in the dark on a lot of issues. Can you explain to me why P=.05 is the ubiquitous standard for statisti

But that's exactly my point: we still are groping around in the dark on a lot of issues. Can you explain to me why P=.05 is the ubiquitous standard for statistical significance? No? Neither can anyone else I've come across. It doesn't get much more basic than that--we still don't know how to apply even simple statistics to science. And what we as a species know, we as individuals don't know. It's true that the knowledge of the human race has moved forward with regard to applying statistics to science, but if you make a habit of reading scientific papers and checking their math, you'll quickly realize that there are critical errors in lots of papers. And even if the scientists get the math right, the journalists and marketing teams who publicize their results rarely do. Better tools don't do us much good if we don't use them.