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Is Statistical Significance Significant? (npr.org)
More than 850 scientists and statisticians told the authors of a Nature commentary that they are endorsing an idea to ban "statistical significance." Critics say that declaring a result to be statistically significant or not essentially forces complicated questions to be answered as true or false. "The world is much more uncertain than that," says Nicoole Lazar, a professor of statistics at the University of Georgia. An entire issue of the journal The American Statistician is devoted to this question, with 43 articles and a 17,500-word editorial that Lazar co-authored.
"In the early 20th century, the father of statistics, R.A. Fisher, developed a test of significance," reports NPR. "It involves a variable called the p-value, that he intended to be a guide for judging results. Over the years, scientists have warped that idea beyond all recognition, creating an arbitrary threshold for the p-value, typically 0.05, and they use that to declare whether a scientific result is significant or not. Slashdot reader apoc.famine writes: In a nutshell, what the statisticians are recommending is that we embrace uncertainty, quantify it, and discuss it, rather than set arbitrary measures for when studies are worth publishing. This way research which appears interesting but which doesn't hit that magical p == 0.05 can be published and discussed, and scientists won't feel pressured to p-hack.
"In the early 20th century, the father of statistics, R.A. Fisher, developed a test of significance," reports NPR. "It involves a variable called the p-value, that he intended to be a guide for judging results. Over the years, scientists have warped that idea beyond all recognition, creating an arbitrary threshold for the p-value, typically 0.05, and they use that to declare whether a scientific result is significant or not. Slashdot reader apoc.famine writes: In a nutshell, what the statisticians are recommending is that we embrace uncertainty, quantify it, and discuss it, rather than set arbitrary measures for when studies are worth publishing. This way research which appears interesting but which doesn't hit that magical p == 0.05 can be published and discussed, and scientists won't feel pressured to p-hack.
1 is prime by that definition, but it's mostly called a unit and defined as *not* prime to make factorising integers into primes unique (up to the order of the factors): Prime number - Primality of 1
Actually 1 is neither prime nor composite by some deep mathematical definitions which go beyond the integers -- they go into the structure of algebraic rings which are generalizations of the integers. If you allow 1 (a unit) to be prime then you break some properties and theorems which everyone generally accepts in the algebra of the integers. The most well known such property is that of unique factorization -- any natural number is factored uniquely into prime factors. If you let 1 be prime then the prime factorization of a composite number can have any number of factors of 1 in it.
The deeper definition of a prime (from my old abstract algebra book) is, "In the Euclidean ring R a nonunit p is said to be a prime element of R if whenever p = ab, where a, b are in R, then one of a or b is a unit in R."
And there is a king which gives the definitive definition -- it is the accepted body of mathematical definitions by the world's mathematical community. There are sometimes differing definitions of a term, but those differences are usually well spelled out in any discussions. You can choose not to accept the definitions as the professionals in the field use them but then don't claim your definition is as good or useful as that of the pros.