A zealous and clever investigator ... undismayed by logic-of-science considerations and relying blissfully on the "exactitude" of modern statistical … - 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."

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.

Because physical theories typically predict numerical values, an improvement in experimental precision reduces the tolerance range and hence increases corroborability. In most psychological research, improved power of a statistical design leads to a prior probability approaching ½ of finding a significant difference in the theoretically predicted direction. Hence the corroboration yielded by "success" is very weak, and becomes weaker with increased precision. "Statistical significance" plays a logical role in psychology precisely the reverse of its role in physics. This problem is worsened by certain unhealthy tendencies prevalent among psychologists, such as a premium placed on experimental "cuteness" and a free reliance upon ad hoc explanations to avoid refutation.