Type S and M errors as a “rhetorical tool”

Update 30/09/2025: I have added a reply by Andrew Gelman below my original blog post. We recently posted a preprint criticizing the idea of Type S and M errors ( https://osf.io/2phzb_v1 ). From our abstract: “While these concepts have been proposed to be useful both when designing a study (prospective) and when evaluating results (retroactive), we argue that these statistics do not facilitate the proper design of studies, nor the meaningful interpretation of results.” In a recent blog post that