[From the blog “‘Retire Statistical Significance’: The discussion” by Andrew Gelman, posted at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science]

“So, the paper by Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, and Blake McShane that we discussed a few weeks ago has just appeared online as a comment piece in Nature, along with a letter with hundreds (or is it thousands?) of supporting signatures.”

“Following the first circulation of that article, the authors of that article and some others of us had some email discussion that I thought might be of general interest.”

“I won’t copy out all the emails, but I’ll share enough to try to convey the sense of the conversation, and any readers are welcome to continue the discussion in the comments.”

…

“As noted above, I accept the continued existence and influence of mob, elites, gatekeepers, and consensus. But I’m also bothered by these, and I like to go around them when I can.”

“Hence, I’m posting this on the blog, where we have the habit of reasoned discussion rather than mob-like rhetorical violence, where the comments have no gatekeeping (in 15 years of blogging, I’ve had to delete less than 5 out of 100,000 comments—that’s 0.005%!—because they were too obnoxious), and where any consensus is formed from discussion that might just lead to the pluralistic conclusion that sometimes no consensus is possible. And by opening up our email discussion to all of you, I’m trying to demystify (to some extent) the elite discourse and make this a more general conversation.”

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