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Science and the Shortcomings of Statistics
Kilrah_il writes "The linked article provides a short summary of the problems scientists have with statistics. As an intern, I see it many times: Doctors do lots of research but don't have a clue when it comes to statistics — and in the social science area, it's even worse. From the article: 'Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.'"
It's not just statistics that people have a problem with...
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
I think your example would be more persuasive if it involved algebra, though.
As with everything, xkcd delivers. My personal favorite :)
People often get caught assuming that Correlation == Causation.
Cheers, Chris
Exactly. I would never believe a statistic that I did not make up myself!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Unfortunately, it is hard to break a viscous cycle. The high viscosity makes it easy to get stuck.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
That particular oversight drives me nuts. An extension of that is when someone uses orthogonal polynomial contrasts and multiple comparison tests on the same data without adjusting their alpha level. If Tukey's HSD accounts for all tests and gives you an overall alpha of 0.05, and you then proceed to run linear and quadratic contrasts, the combined alpha level is actually 0.10, not 0.05 because Tukey's doesn't adjust for contrasts and contrasts don't contain adjustments for multiple comparisons.
I'm actually at a scientific meeting and saw 7 presentations in which they "double dipped" on their statisitics before we broke for lunch.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
*Ahem* Cue carbon dating.
To be fair the problem with carbon dating is not merely curve fitting. A larger problem is the when God created the universe in Oct 4004BC (or thereabouts), He created Adam with a belly-button.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I feel somewhat vindicated for being no good at econometrics when I see where the people who were good at it have landed us.....
Physics (yes, Physics, THE hardest of hard sciences) is full of terrible mathematics, absolutely terrible, shockingly bad stuff. The good ones know it, some will say it doesn't matter because their butchery comes up with "accurate" results. If they can't even get their analysis right, what can we expect of the softer sciences? That said physics is not so much concerned with statistics as it is probability, none the less, they have some serious problems, for example they often simply decide highly non-convergent things should converge because the experiment says it should...
The greatest tragedy in modern science (in my eyes) is the loss of physics as a hard science, currently these guys are way off with the fairies and producing nothing of worth, string theorists are the worst. We'll see what the CERN guys manage to come up with, but right now the mathematicians have taken the ball and run with it. It has been said that physics has become too hard for the Physicists...
I am not trolling, I am quite serious about Physicists playing dodgey games with mathematics.
That since a dead clock is right twice a day, those two times cause the clock to work again?
No, the clock is right all of the time, it just shows local sidereal time and is often in the wrong place
Indeed. For example: 6 out of 7 dwarves aren't Happy.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!