On The Nineteenth-century Origins Of Significance Testing And P-hacking

This paper examines the development of Laplacean practical certainty from 1810, when Laplace proved his central limit theorem, to 1925, when Ronald A. Fisher published his Statistical Methods for Research Workers. Although Laplace's explanations of the applications of his theorem were accessible to only a few mathematicians, expositions published by Joseph Fourier in 1826 and 1829 made the simplest applications accessible to many...