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My anecdotal experience in a psychology faculty makes me think there is an issue of statistics mastery in the social sciences. There's also an issue of corrupti
by abyssin 3y ago
My anecdotal experience in a psychology faculty makes me think there is an issue of statistics mastery in the social sciences. There's also an issue of corruption like p-hacking, but so far the statistics courses I've had were poor and the teachers didn't really understand what they were teaching.
- jampekka 3y agoYes, but this is not necessarily (only) because of the teacher quality. Statistical testing is quite complicated and very easy to do wrong (violate assumptions). On average scientists aren't very technically or mathematically apt, so in the few short courses things have to be taught in a "cookbook style".
- lotsofpulp 3y agoIn the social “sciences”, problem 1, 2 and 3 is that there is no way to measure any of the properties they want to test. Yet, society wants to pretend like we can.
- jampekka 3y agoShort term individual and small group behavior in artificial conditions can be somewhat reliably measured. How well and to what situations these genralize to is a harder question. Larger groups and timescales are (in practice) outside the domain of science (in the most rigorous form) and must be studied with other methods and epistemological criteria. This also leads to major abuse of statistics as the inference has to be done with unrealistic assumptions and unwieldly models. The "brand" of science is so strong that many fields, especially economics, want to appropriate it even though they don't and can't do science in the strict definition.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]