Why I've lost faith in p values
&#x27;The fundamental problem is that p values don&#x27;t mean what we &quot;need&quot; them to mean, that is p(null | significant effect).&#x27;<p>From Bayes&#x27; theorem, this more useful probability is given by p * x, where x = p(null) &#x2F; p(significant effect). Maybe we could just lower the accepted threshold for statistical significance by several orders of magnitude so that, for statistically significant p, p * x is still small even for careful (i.e. big) estimates of x (e.g. maybe a Fermi approximation of the total number of experiments ever performed in the field in question). This doesn&#x27;t necessarily imply impractically big sample sizes, although obviously this depends on the specifics (I believe the p value for a given value of the t-statistic decays exponentially with sample size).