>Ok, but please do not vote for anyone calling themselves "scientist" who practices NHST, you will only be perpetuating this nation- (even civilization-) destroying practice:
Can you expand on this? What is NHST?
Can you expand on this? What is NHST?
The parent poster has ... for some inexplicable reason ... decided that this technique is invalid. This reeks of a profound misunderstanding of the technique, and a failure to discriminate between poor use and invalidity.
While there is all sorts of things wrong with NHST, the primary thing is that researchers never actually test their own hypothesis. Instead they test a "null" hypothesis that acts as a strawman, usually that some parameter equals exactly zero. Then when the strawman is "rejected", they go on to say the results support whatever theory/idea it is they favor.
Rather than come up with precise predictions deduced from their idea, they leave them vague (If I am right, A will be correlated with B). Then calculations are used to reject the very precise strawman, giving an entirely false sense of rigor to a handwavy, nonsensical ritual.
It is very common, and seems to get more and more popular every year despite all efforts by scientists and statisticians to stop it (because it lets you seem scientific about proving whatever you want). I was trained to think that way myself not too long ago, with absolutely zero mention of any controversy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4347431/
http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf
http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/30/why-the-garden-of-forking...
How is "there is no difference between my groups/conditions" a strawman?
This is by far the most common H0.
For nearly all use cases many plausible models/theories/ideas will predict "not exactly zero difference", so rejection of the hypothesis "difference = zero" is useless to the scientist. Mathematicians apparently don't get this, which is what inspired the Fisher paper I linked to.
And yes, it is the most common H0. No argument there. The problem is so widespread and destructive that the mind instinctively rejects its existence as unbelievable.
>No one predicts "an absence of effect"
In my field, we most certainly do predict an absence of an effect, in the following sense:
1. if a manipulation does not have an effect on the system, then we expect no systematic deviations in the measurement distribution
2. point 1 will be revealed by H0 (no systematic change in measurement distribution across conditions) not being rejected.
It's beginning to sound like you've encountered people who misuse or misinterpret this technique -- and I agree that there are alarmingly many such people -- but this is different from the technique being invalid.