ABSTRACT
Deming, William Edwards We admit with Sir Winston Churchill that it sometimes pays to admit the obvious: we do not perform an experiment to find out if two varieties of wheat or two drugs are equal. We know in advance without spending a dollar on an experiment that they are not equal. The difference between two treatments or between two areas or two groups of people, will show up as ‘significantly different’ if the experiment be conducted through a sufficient number of trials, even though the difference be so small that it is of no scientific or economic consequence.
