>"I suck at statistics and won't make a good formal scientist"
Most really good science got done before statistics was even a thing (starting in the 1930s-1940s). Stats has very little to do with being a good scientist.
Most really good science got done before statistics was even a thing (starting in the 1930s-1940s). Stats has very little to do with being a good scientist.
What does random mean? It just means you didn't include every possible influence in your mathematical model of whats going on. Instead you used some distribution of "noise" as an approximation to whatever was really going on.
Eg, if you know everything about airflow, gravitational, electrical, etc forces on a coin throughout a flip, you can predict which side it will land on with near 100% accuracy. Most of the time we don't have info about that available so use the binomial distribution approximation.
>"where effect sizes are gigantic"
Most science has nothing to do with "effect sizes", in fact I'd say concern about "effect sizes" is indicative of very rudimentary science. Advanced science is concerned with making precise and accurate predictions.
In physics, it is fundamentally impossible to predict the outcome of wave function collapses/pick your favorite interpretation's verb. CERN doesn't do statistics on their histograms because they don't have good models...
That aside, does the difference between a lack of knowledge and a lack of predictability really matter? Either way all you can do is calculate the odds.
>Most science has nothing to do with "effect sizes",
True, that language is not used everywhere. However if your department deals with signals that are hard to distinguish from background then you have some way of expressing that idea in your vernacular, whatever it is.
This is one interpretation of quantum mechanics. Plenty of physics is done without any consideration of this.
>"CERN doesn't do statistics on their histograms because they don't have good models..."
I believe the histograms you are referring to were done on the data, not on the predictions. And afaik they actually do lack a good model of the higgs boson mass, since they never predicted an exact mass.
>"However if your department deals with signals that are hard to distinguish from background then you have some way of expressing that idea in your vernacular, whatever it is."
Distinguishing signal from background is the same thing, its rudimentary stuff you do when you can't predict exactly what you are looking for. The key difference is that in advanced science you check for deviations from the model you believe is correct. No one at CERN believed the standard model without a higgs boson they used for the background reflected reality.
If you are in a field where you don't need statistics, it is not because they aren't at play, but instead because they all have -9999 in the exponent and you have implicitly decided not to worry about them.
There is no fundamental uncertainty in GR predictions. There is none in the stefan-boltzmann law, etc. In many cases whatever QM uncertainty exists will be negligible next to measurement error and so is not considered. Acting like QM uncertainty has anything to do with 99% of physics is nonsense.
If you are in a field where you don't need statistics, it is not because they aren't at play, but instead because they all have -9999 in the exponent and you have implicitly decided not to worry about them.
I feel some topics are getting confused here.
Now you seem to be saying "a field that doesn't need statistics" only doesn't need it because the error due to QM is negligible compared to other sources. How do you account for all the advances before QM and statistics?
Discoveries made before the introduction of error analysis turned out to either be lucky or wrong - a pattern repeated every time we all realize that something was being overlooked. It's worth pointing out that the astronomers of yore probably knew that their measurements weren't perfect and that averaging them was a good idea, which counts as statistics.
It makes no sense to be concerned about sources of prediction error that are orders of magnitude smaller than your measurement error. Such concerns would only waste time and money for no benefit. This has nothing to do with "straggling" or expected "effect size".
No one would do this, its once again a "rudimentary science" behavior. People have figured out what we need to know to get the exact relationship between voltage and position.
Or perhaps science has become so institutionalized that any truly novel ideas are suppressed either directly or indirectly (eg the funding for that type of thing is already maxed out).
Or maybe the truly novel ideas are getting classified: https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/the-thousands-of-secret...