On 13/02/2013 8:40 AM, Charles Geyer wrote:
Please do not change the defaults for the show.signif.stars option or for the default.stringsAsFactors option. Backward compatibility is more important than your convenience. The same sort of argument could be made for changing the default of the "[" function from drop = TRUE to drop = FALSE. It would lead to less gotchas when coding and make R a saner programming language (less infernoish), but would annoy and confuse ordinary users and is not "the R way".
That is something that might improve the language, but it would be far more disruptive than either of the other two changes. It's a matter of balance. In my judgment its cost would greatly exceed its benefit. In the case of stringsAsFactors, I think the benefits would exceed the costs. In the case of the stars, I think both costs and benefits are negligible. I think "the R way" is this kind of balance, with a fairly strong conservative tilt. Due to the conservatism, I'm not planning to make the stringsAsFactors change for everybody, but I have made an effort to make it easier to make the change individually via the option() setting.
Duncan Murdoch
In any case your philosophical arguments about signif stars are bogus. Non-simultaneous have exactly the same problem as these "regression stars". As I once said in a paper, they are something "users think they can interpret" with the unstated implication that they really cannot. Charlie's law of users says ordinary users of statistics actually ignore confidence levels and treat all confidence intervals as if they cover (i. e., take the true confidence level to be 100%). You cannot fix lack of user understanding of statistics by any such simplistic idea. Yes R is a prime example of "worse is better", but it is the way it is. Don't try to turn it into C++. Thank you.
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