The P value cannot say this: all it can do is summarize the data assuming a specific null hypothesis.
I agree with this statement. I feel like p-values can only tell us so much with results being statistically significant or not, but holding so much power where it can tell us that just because it's 0.01, it's a 1% chance of Motyl's results being a false alarm seems like a big stretch.
It turned out that the problem was not in the data or in Motyl's analyses. It lay in the surprisingly slippery nature of the P value, which is neither as reliable nor as objective as most scientists assume. “P values are not doing their job, because they can't,” says Stephen Ziliak, an economist at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois, and a frequent critic of the way statistics are used.
I agree with this statement. I feel like whenever we run tests from the data we collect, we depend on the p-value to tell us the results (as in if it's statistically significant or not). In this case, the p-value was completely off and it was the problem rather than the data or in Motyl's analysis.
Bergstrom, C. T., & Dean, N. (2020, May 1). Opinion | What the Proponents of ‘Natural’ Herd Immunity Don’t Say. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-herd-immunity.html