On 13-02-09 3:49 PM, Tim Triche, Jr. wrote:
To clarify, I favor changing the defaults for stringsAsFactors and
show.signif.stars to FALSE in R-3.0.0, and view any attempt to remove
either functionality as a seemingly simple but fundamentally misguided idea.
Both of these were discussed by R Core. I think it's unlikely the
default for stringsAsFactors will be changed (some R Core members like
the current behaviour), but it's fairly likely the show.signif.stars
default will change. (That's if someone gets around to it: I
personally don't care about that one. P-values are commonly used
statistics, and the stars are just a simple graphical display of them.
I find some p-values to be useful, and the display to be harmless.)
I think it's really unlikely the more extreme changes (i.e. dropping
show.signif.stars completely, or dropping p-values) will happen.
Regarding stringsAsFactors: I'm not going to defend keeping it as is,
I'll let the people who like it defend it. What I will likely do is
make a few changes so that character vectors are automatically changed
to factors in modelling functions, so that operating with
stringsAsFactors=FALSE doesn't trigger silly warnings.
Duncan Murdoch
This is just my opinion, of course. The change could easily be accompanied
by a startup notice or release notes indicating that the changes have been
made, and can be reverted to past behavior if the user so desires. Perhaps
more users will investigate the various settings, as a happy side effect.
My thanks to everyone who spends time supporting and working on R-core.
On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:44 PM, Tim Triche, Jr. <tim.tri...@gmail.com>wrote:
Changing the default for show.signif.stars should be sufficient to ensure
that, if people are going to get themselves into trouble, they will have to
do it on purpose. It's just a visual cue; removing it will not remove the
underlying issue, namely blind acceptance of unlikely null models and
distributions.
For any complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and
wrong. As grants and careers can depend on these magic numbers, Upton
Sinclair might save everyone some trouble... It is difficult to get a man
to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not
understanding.
stringsAsFactors, however, is responsible for an endless stream of mildly
irritating misunderstandings, and defaulting that to FALSE would be very
nice.
Just my $0.02. Defaults are one of the most powerful forces in the
universe.
Also, I liked your book.
On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 10:48 AM, Norm Matloff <matl...@cs.ucdavis.edu>wrote:
Thanks for bringing this up, Frank.
Since many of us are "educators," I'd like to suggest a bolder approach.
Discontinue even offering the stars as an option. Sadly, we can't stop
reporting p-values, as the world expects them, but does R need to cater
to that attitude by offering star display? For that matter, why not
have R report confidence intervals as a default?
Many years ago, I wrote a short textbook on stat, and included a
substantial section on the dangers of significance testing. All three
internal reviewers liked it, but the funny part is that all three said,
"I agree with this, but no one else will." :-)
Norm
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