Famous historical example(s) of Type II error It's very easy to find famous examples of Type I errors in the histories of various fields.  However, I'm struggling to find even one clear example of a Type II error.  For my purposes, I'm specifically looking for an example that:


*

*can be easily described to an undergraduate class in a few minutes or less

*actually occurred (rather than being hypothetical)

 A: "The harm done by tests of significance" (pdf) relates 3  true stories in which not rejecting the null while it was actually false (so making a Type II error) has been interpreted as accepting the null and had lead to bad general interest decisions. Here is a brief summary of one of them:


*

*The practice of allowing right-turn-on-red (or RTOR) at signalized intersections started in California in 1937.

*To see weither this can be generalized to other state, a consultant did before–after study at 20 intersections for Virginia and concluded, quite correctly, that the change was not statistically significant.

*More published studies followed. An example: one study in 1977 found that there were 19 crashes involving right turning vehicles before and 24 after allowing RTOR and "conclude correctly that “this increase in accidents in not statistically significant, and therefore it cannot be said that this increase in RTOR accidents is attributable to RTOR”". Several small studies all pointing in the same direction get published but with statistically not significant results continued to accumulate all concluding that there was no significant difference in crashes.

*"After RTOR became nearly universally used in North America, several large data sets became available and the adverse effect of RTOR could be established."
The author concludes:

Researchers obtain real data which, while noisy, time and again point in a certain direction. However, instead of saying: “here is my estimate of the safety effect, here is its precision, and this is how what I found relates to previous findings”, the data is processed by NHST, and the researcher says, correctly but pointlessly: “I cannot be sure that the safety effect is not zero”.

