“The Fallacy Of The Null-Hypothesis Statistical-Significance Test”, 1960 (; backlinks; similar):
In this paper, I wish to examine a dogma of inferential procedure which, for psychologists at least, has attained the status of a religious conviction.
The dogma to be scrutinized is the “null-hypothesis statistical-significance test” orthodoxy that passing statistical judgment on a scientific hypothesis by means of experimental observation is a decision procedure wherein one rejects or accepts a null hypothesis according to whether or not the value of a sample statistic yielded by an experiment falls within a certain predetermined “rejection region” of its possible values.
The thesis to be advanced is that despite the awesome preeminence this method has attained in our experimental journals and textbooks of applied statistics, it is based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of rational inference, and is seldom if ever appropriate to the aims of scientific research.