| >And how does the Right Question appear if not through exploration and manipulation of the data? Questions don't magically come out of a data set. Doing so is called a fishing expedition and usually results in boring, descriptive results which have no impact. To answer impactful questions, you must go into your data collection with the questions in mind. To understand what questions to ask, you need a trained, critical, and creative mind. That is something you don't get from pushing bits. >If you can't program and manipulate data Programming, and manipulating data is easy. Almost every new statistician these days can, and does do this routinely. What's hard is the years of intuition about what is meaningful and what is noise. I know. It's hard to hear, and career programmers most of all hate to hear it, but its the truth. |
I'm not really sure how to respond to the idea that exploring a dataset isn't a useful way to help develop questions about it. It's only a "fishing expedition" if you have no idea what you're doing.