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What is the message conveyed when the board of a professional association X appoints a Task Force intended to dispel the supposition that a position advanced by the Executive Director of association X does not reflect the views of association X on a topic that members of X disagree on? What it says to me is that there is a serious break-down of communication amongst the leadership and membership of that association. So while I’m extremely glad that the ASA appointed the Task Force on Statistical Significance and Replicability in 2019, I’m very sorry that the main reason it was needed was to address concerns that an editorial put forward by the ASA Executive Director (and 2 others) “might be mistakenly interpreted as official ASA policy”. The 2021 Statement of the Task Force (Benjamini et al. 2021) explains:
In 2019 the President of the American Statistical Association (ASA) established a task force to address concerns that a 2019 editorial in The American Statistician (an ASA journal) might be mistakenly interpreted as official ASA policy. (The 2019 editorial recommended eliminating the use of “p < 0.05” and “statistically significant” in statistical analysis.) This document is the statement of the task force…
Error Statistics Philosophy 