Null Hypotheses and Public Discourse

Even the self-important newspaper of "record," the New York Times, could benefit from a basic statistics refresher. As Andrew Gelman (Columbia--Statistics) observed, a Feb. 11, 2016, NYT headline read as follows: "Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein's Theory". Of course, as Gelman rightly points out, a more technically accurate headline would have read: "Gravitational Waves Detected, Not Falsifying Einstein's Theory".