[duguxu]

I agree with you but IMO, this could be a good thing sometimes. Avoiding statistics to some extent requires more deterministic experiments, where statistics are limited to quantum uncertainty or gaussian distribution. Otherwise there is probably some unknown mechanism to be revealed, and that’s exactly what the community expects physicists to do.

[tylermw]

There's no such thing as a deterministic experiment. There are so many sources of uncertainty in all fields of experimental physics, and statistics can help quantify and even design better experiments. It's just a shame statistics has never become a part of the standard physicist's education.

[duguxu]

I agree that statistics can help a lot in experiments and should be a part of standard education. My point here is, when physicists encounter uncertainty, they are encouraged more by the current culture to design a better experiment with deterministic theory to reduce the error, compared to analysing the results statistically. It would be better to have both, but it's not as bad as you might think for focusing more on the former one, at least for some fields I'm familiar with.