Unconditionally? No, and neither should you. Beliefs don’t work that way.
I should have said, “do you believe any scientific results?”
If a scientific paper gives a fundamentally-sound statistical analysis of the effect it purports to prove, I’ll give it more credence than a paper rejecting the null hypothesis at p < 0.05. On the other hand, a study rejecting the null hypothesis at p < 0.05 is going to provide far more useful information than a small collection of anecdotes, and both are probably better than my personal intuition in a field I have no experience with.
To clarify, I wasn’t saying that maybe you shouldn’t believe scientific results because they use NHST specifically. I meant that if you think that scientists tend to stick with bad methods for decades then NHST probably isn’t the only bad method they’re using.
As you say though, NHST is helpful in many cases even if other methods might be more helpful. So I guess it doesn’t say anything that awful about the way science works.
I should have said, “do you believe any scientific results?”
To clarify, I wasn’t saying that maybe you shouldn’t believe scientific results because they use NHST specifically. I meant that if you think that scientists tend to stick with bad methods for decades then NHST probably isn’t the only bad method they’re using.
As you say though, NHST is helpful in many cases even if other methods might be more helpful. So I guess it doesn’t say anything that awful about the way science works.