Why proper understanding of confidence intervals and statistical significance is important.

Abstract

To the Editor: The explanation of inference from confidence intervals by Hemming and Taljaard is interesting but unfortunately incorrect. The authors may have fallen for the confidence interval variation of the P value fallacy — the mistaken idea that the P value (or confidence interval) can capture both the long term outcomes of an experiment, as commonly reflected in the phrase “a trend to significance (P = 0.06)”, and the evidential meaning of a single result...