[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Yep. There’s unfortunately a large contingent of people, usually the people that haven’t conducted quantitative research themselves, but have maybe read some, that are just impressed by numbers. It’s like the next level up from people that say “science says that …”.

[pavlov]

It’s the “data doesn’t lie” people.

They believe themselves to be objectively data-driven but don’t see the forest because they’re so busy looking at the trees they are shown.

[rscho]

It's far worse than that. People using numbers as supportive arguments often generated said numbers themselves, from scratch (meaning, they also collected the data). I'm currently redoing a study from an old prof. The old study was of a more trusted design, and found a massively positive effect. The new study (including old data) has an effect firmly grounded on zero. Those people aren't even always dishonest. They're just incompetent.