P Values and Statistical Errors

Are P values the “gold standard” for statistically significant findings?  From an article today that appeared today in Nature:

“The irony is that when UK statistician Ronald Fisher introduced the P value in the 1920s, he did not mean it to be a definitive test. He intended it simply as an informal way to judge whether evidence was significant in the old-fashioned sense: worthy of a second look.”

In the era of “big data” and automated algorithms that can test thousands of correlations, we are essentially guaranteed to find statistical significant P values in our analyses.  Understanding the limits of what this test tells us is essential.

Read more in the online article on Nature.com.