In general that is an inaccurate and naive criticism of a vast area of work. I also think you are confusing statistics with its application by scientists. Howe

In general that is an inaccurate and naive criticism of a vast area of work. I also think you are confusing statistics with its application by scientists. However, there is some truth in this regarding the application by scientists. I did my PhD in the field of computational statistics applied to population genetics. There you are usually trying to infer past history, and therefore have no hope of experimental verification. Although some important advances in computational statistics originate in that field, there were also lots of papers just throwing increasingly fancy Bayesian MCMC software at datasets without the honesty of experimental physics about what is knowable and what sadly might not be. Also, many scientists, away from physics, simply do not have the mathematical maturity to understand most of statistics.