In a 1919 paper titled ‘Mathematical vs. Scientific Significance’, Edwin G. Boring, an American psychologist, tried to explain why basing scientific intuition on mathematical results alone was misguided. He pointed out that “scientific generalisation is a broader question than mathematical description.”
One hundred years later, the same argument against the flattening of science to one magical number has reared its head once more. In March 2019, the American Statistical Association (ASA) focused a special issue of its journal American Statistician on how to move to a world beyond “p