Maybe reading http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/06/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-pop-bayesianism/ might help you.
I doubt it. I already did and clearly it didn't help :-P
There a difference between asking yourself: "Does this drug work better than other drugs?" and then deciding based on the answer to that question whether or not to approve the drug and asking "What's the probability that the drug works?" and making a decision based on it.
In practice the FDA does ask their statistical tools "Does this drug work better than other drugs?" and then decides on that basis whether to approve the drug.
Why is that a problem? Take an issue like developing new antibiotica. Antibiotica are an area where ...
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)