A recent issue of Ecology (95:3, Mar. 2014) includes a mini-symposium on p-values. (For a comment from Andrew Gelman (Columbia--Statistics) that did not make it into the issue (although invited), click here.) Gelman's point about null hypotheses bears highlighting:
"In common practice, however, the “null hypothesis” is a straw man that exists only to be rejected. In this case, I am typically much more interested in the size of the effect, its persistence, and how it varies across different situations. I would like to reserve hypothesis testing for the exploration of serious hypotheses and not as in indirect form of statistical inference that typically has the effect of reducing scientific explorations to yes/no conclusions."
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