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Comment by cossatot | Hacker News Reader

Always a good time to re-read Cosma Shalizi's classic "So You Think You Have a Power Law — Well Isn't That Special?" (http://bactra.org/weblog/491.html)

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See also Mar's Law as taken from Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design.[1]

    Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

[1] http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/old_site/academics/akins_laws....

> that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions, learn nothing about data analysis. (I certainly didn't.)

Statistics really needs to be a fundamental skill taught in all sciences (or any field involved in research/studies) as 101 courses as math and writing are.

It's amazing how much time/energy is wasted in research, across a wide swath of fields, because the ultimate analysis lack a strong fundamental grasp of statistics and data analysis.

I want to pull my hair out every time I read a Wikipedia article documenting the historical back/forth of a particular social science... where the status quo of knowledge is repeatedly discredited based on a biased manipulation or simply a poor grasp of analyzing complex multi-faceted data.

I completely agree. You can be a genius in your field, but mess things up when it comes to basic statistics. it can be surprisingly easy to make major errors. analyzing your own data is a fundamental skill that not only affects how you present your own research, but how you learn from and perform your research.

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