a second: as a data scientist, you’ve been through this scenario (chances are, more than once). Someone stopped you mid-conversation and asked you, “ What exactly does a p-value mean? ” I am also very certain that your answer to that question was different when you first started your data science journey, vs a couple of months later, vs a couple of years later. But what I’m curious about now is, the first time you got asked that question, were you able to give a clean, confident answer? Or did you say something like: “It’s… the probability the result is random? ” (not necessarily in those exact words!) The truth is, you’re not alone. Many people who use p-values regularly don’t actually understand what they mean. And to be fair, statistics and maths classes haven’t exactly made this easy. They both emphasized the importance of p-values, but neither connected their meaning to that importance.…