a theory that has seven facts for it and three facts against it is not in good shape, and it would not be considered so in any developed science. - Paul E. Meehl

My thesis in a nutshell: "There is no convincing reason to assume that explicitly formalized mathematical rules and the clinician's creativity are equally suited for any given kind of task, or that their comparative effectiveness is the same for different tasks. Current clinical practice should be much more critically examined with this in mind than it has been."

the null hypothesis in the life sciences is almost always false—if taken literally— in designs that involve any sort of self-selection or correlations found in the organisms as they come, that is, where perfect randomization of treatments by the experimenter does not exhaust the manipulations. Hence even “experimental” (rather than statistical or file data) research will exhibit this if interaction effects involving attributes of the persons are studied. Consequently, whether or not the null hypothesis is rejected is simply and solely a function of statistical power.

Owing to the abusive reliance upon significance testing—rather than point or interval estimation, curve shape, or ordination—in the social sciences, the usual article summarizing the state of the evidence on a theory (such as appears in the Psychological Bulletin) is nearly useless.