Eli5 what significance has for value. Ive heard that for example when there is a 5% significance it only means that the value differs from the null hypothesis but stating a difference doesnt exactly mean how valuable it is. So how valuable is significance
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If you’re doing a study, and want to test whether or not eating cucumber makes you better at playing basketball, you can do that by getting a bunch of people and divide them into two teams. One of the teams get to eat a cucumber before the match, and the other team doesn’t.
This seems like it’d definitely show if there’s any effect, but it’s not that simple. There are always other factors that might also affect the outcome, maybe the people in one of the teams just happened to sleep better the night before the match, maybe they’re just on average taller?
What you’ll try to do is take these factors into consideration, and using a formula you’ll come up with the probability that the effects shown in the result are random, and has nothing to do with cucumber.
If that probability is less than 5%, we say that the result is *significant*, 5% is just an arbitrary line we’ve drawn. Note that this use of the word “significant” is different from how most people use it, it doesn’t mean that cucumber has a great effect on your ability to play basketball, it just means that the effect probably isn’t random.
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