Reply #6: Originally, It Was a Convention Used for Academic Publishing

[On the Road]

Since to follow the scientific method you needed a quantitative standard that would have a Yes/No answer. In other words, they ARE supposed to distinguish between 94% and 96% in journal articles. In practice, many of them use weasel words if their results are almost but not quite significant.

Doesn't mean everyone else has to do it in casual analysis. I've made the same point on other threads, but a lot of people still seem tied to the MOE as a magic number.