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by TangoTrotFox 2988 days ago
I cannot speak for the person you are responding to, but in my [agreement] of his critique of statistics, I am implicitly speaking of social statistics. I think there is a vast difference in e.g. a statistical modeling of the behavior of electrons and e.g. the statistical modeling of some sort of human behavior.
1 comments
haZard_OS 2988 days ago
...but that just isn't true. Statistical analysis is (among other things) a way to quantify our uncertainty. If done approriately, the statistics simply communicate the role probability played in moving from the experimental premises to the results.

  The level of uncertainty in most (perhaps all) experiments involving particles in a vacuum is far lower than experiments involving human behavior. Statistics doesn't create the uncertainty, it communicates the uncertainty.

  I can use propositional logic to arrive at the conclusion that "Unicorns are real" yet I don't encounter many people throwing logic itself under the bus because of that.
People lie while speaking English every day yet I don't encounter many people claiming that English is inherently untrustworthy.

  Statistics has been a whipping boy for a long time by people who don't know much about statistics or just fail to think clearly about what is being said.
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buvanshak 2988 days ago
> If done approriately..

This is the whole point. It is the difficulty in doing so, or the difficulty in deciding if this was done appropriately or not is the only thing that it untrustworthy..

>People lie while speaking English every day yet I don't encounter many people claiming that English is inherently untrustworthy.

No one expect a statement to be true simply because it was uttered in English.

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TangoTrotFox 2988 days ago
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say, and your post formatting is not helping.

I would recommend reading the article. The executive summary summarizes things. The issue is not statistics in and of themselves, but how they are used in the overwhelming number of studies - particularly those in the social sciences or related with human physiology.

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