Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ak_yo 3187 days ago
> Anyone looking at the presented data should be able to reason the result without needing to conduct a statistical test.

Part of the problem, though, is that scientific results are often counterintuitive, or (particularly in the social sciences) are easy to view as obvious after we know what the answer is.

One famous example: the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld once gave a talk where he asked whether urban or rural men had adjusted more easily to the day-to-day routines of military service in World War II. There are equally obvious reasons why rural men would adjust more easily (e.g. they have more experience with physical labor, have experience with guns) or urban men would (e.g. they're used to crowded conditions, have more experience with a hierarchical division of labor).

1 comments

>Part of the problem, though, is that scientific results are often counterintuitive

The only reason they are counterintuitive is because the current model of intuition is flawed.

A good experiment creates new intuition by creating a new model by which once counterintuitive results become intuitive.