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I took a lot of probability and statistics in college (I was a Math major); I tend to assume that very few people using statistics understand what they are doin

I took a lot of probability and statistics in college (I was a Math major); I tend to assume that very few people using statistics understand what they are doing well enough to avoid serious mistakes. True story: for one class project, I was directed to find a published paper, acquire the same data set, and verify the results. I contacted the author and got his actual data, ran the model (ordinary least squares) and verified the result; then I checked for heteroskedasticity, found it, corrected for it, and determined that the correction made all of his results go away. His model was completely inconclusive. (The author was a university professor in economics; the paper was based on his doctoral dissertation.)

disgruntledphd2 3y ago
Yup, this is depressingly normal (heh). Stats is hard, and people don't interrogate their results when they like them (unfortunately).
kqr 3y ago
This is a feedback problem. Most users of statistics have their results validated not against reality, but in the eyes of other users of statistics. This means if the process you follow sort of looks right, the result will be accepted as true, and you will never learn otherwise. Finance people have a much more nuanced understanding of statistics, because their use of statistics results in red or black numbers at the end of the year.