One hypothesis is that most science is mostly coming up with decent hypotheses via unbiased human intuition about already-well-understood mechanisms, or in less fortunate cases via social/political/rent-seeking necessity; the testing the hypothesis part is usually very easy to the point where the statistics are superfluous, or it's very hard to the point where statistics are grant-justifyingly rigorous-looking but woefully lacking in power. Thus by the time you're actually looking at the statistics they can be good or bad or point one way or the other and it really doesn't matter much, what matters is the intelligent-person-unbiased-apolitical-common-sense-appraised plausibility of the hypothesis and the epistemological soundness of the methodology. Edit: Daniel Burfoot's comment jibes well with this one.