<Here is a link to the entire 14 page paper for those who would like to
read the entire paper before commenting:>
 Guilty as charged, thanks for the link.  It is not nearly as confusing as
the excerpts make it out to be, but it is somewhat more worrisome with some
of the things being proposed.  I was particularly troubled by this.


<This preference for false negative results (Type II error), where a
substance is incorrectly concluded to be safe when in fact it is harmful,
is compatible with the livelihood stakes of academic

scientists. This is because a false negative would lead a researcher to
miss a discovery but not damage his or her reputation to the same degree as
a false positive, which might be more professionally damaging when it is
revealed to be incorrect and causes the researcher to retract the
publication [43].>



Which later on is promoted again in the paper.



My problem is that burden of proof also happens to be the way in which we
judge guilt in a court of law, which probably has as much to do with the
way things are set up as the scientists’ reputations.  It also puts the
onus on designing larger experiments with bigger sample size, because the
alternative is that you can easily get a false positive with a smaller
sample.  It would sure make it easier to publish if we changed things, to
the point where false positives would cloud out everything else.  IMO
anyway.



Jeremy West Michigan

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