▲ | sweezyjeezy 7 hours ago | |
This is a subtle point that even a lot of scientists don't understand. A p value or < 0.05 doesn't mean "there is less than a 5% chance the treatment is not effective". It means that "if the treatment was only as effective, (or worse) than the original, we'd have < 5% chance of seeing results this good". Note that in the second case we're making a weaker statement - it doesn't directly say anything about the particular experiment we ran and whether it was right or wrong with any probability, only about how extreme the final result was. Consider this example - we don't change the treatment at all, we just update its name. We split into two groups and run the same treatment on both, but under one of the two names at random. We get a p value of 0.2 that the new one is better. Is it reasonable to say that there's a >= 80% chance it really was better, knowing that it was literally the same treatment? |