On March 21 the American Statistical Association (ASA) sent out a shocking email to all members that the lead editorial in a special, open-access issue of The American Statistician calls for abandoning the use of “statistically significant”.  With irony evidently intended by their italicization, they proclaimed it “a significant day in the history of the ASA and statistics.

I think the probability of experimenters ignoring ASA’s advice and continuing to say “statistically significant” approaches 100 percent. Out of the myriad of suggestions in the 43 articles of The American Statistician special issue the ones I like best come from statisticians Daniel J. Benjamin and James O. Berger. They propose that, because “p-values are often misinterpreted in ways that lead to overstating the evidence against the null hypothesis”, the threshold for “statistical significance” of novel discoveries require a threshold of 0.005. By their reckoning, a p-value between 0.05 and 0.005 should the be degraded to “suggestive,” rather than “significant.”*

It’s a shame that p-hackers, skewered in this xkcd cartoon, undermined the sound application of statistics for filtering out findings unsupported by the data.

*The American Statistician, 2019, Vol. 73, No. S1, 186–191: Statistical Inference in the 21st Century, “Three Recommendations for Improving the Use of p-Values”.