Please do not change the defaults for the show.signif.stars option or for
the default.stringsAsFactors option.  Backward compatibility is more
important than your convenience.  The same sort of argument could be made
for changing the default of the "[" function from drop = TRUE to drop =
FALSE.  It would lead to less gotchas when coding and make R a saner
programming language (less infernoish), but would annoy and confuse
ordinary users and is not "the R way".  In any case your philosophical
arguments about signif stars are bogus.  Non-simultaneous have exactly the
same problem as these "regression stars".  As I once said in a paper, they
are something "users think they can interpret" with the unstated
implication that they really cannot.  Charlie's law of users says ordinary
users of statistics actually ignore confidence levels and treat all
confidence intervals as if they cover (i. e., take the true confidence
level to be 100%).  You cannot fix lack of user understanding of statistics
by any such simplistic idea.  Yes R is a prime example of "worse is
better", but it is the way it is.  Don't try to turn it into C++.  Thank
you.
-- 
Charles Geyer
Professor, School of Statistics
University of Minnesota
charlie@stat.umn.edu

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