Thursday, March 27, 2014

Fisher in 1937, p. 16 of The Design of Experiments, Second Edition


It is usual and convenient for experimenters to take-5 per cent. as a standard level of significance, in the sense that they are prepared to ignore all results which fail to reach this standard, and, by this means, to eliminate from further discussion the greater part of the fluctuations which chance causes have introduced into their experimental results. No such selection can eliminate the whole of the possible effects of chance. coincidence, and if we accept this convenient convention, and agree that an event which would occur by chance only once in 70 trials is decidedly" significant," in the statistical sense, we thereby admit that no isolated experiment, however significant in itself, can suffice for the experimental demonstration of any natural phenomenon; for the "one chance in a million" will undoubtedly occur, with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us. In order to assert that a natural phenomenon is experimentally demonstrable we need, not an isolated record, but a reliable method of procedure. In relation to the test of significance, we may say that a phenomenon is experimentally demonstrable when we know how to conduct an experiment which will rarely fail to give us a statistically significant result.