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Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have a duty to communicate what is true and what is not though. Passing that judgement duty to the general public is irresponsible and unwise (it's easy to claim anything with flawed / misleading statistics). Ideally someone would have come up with a framework that is better than statistic tests to justify levels of truth, but so far we dont have one

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When you've got empirically gathered data, pretty much every type of analysis you can do with it comes under the umbrella of "statistics". I think any better truth measuring framework can only be statistical.

There are very few principles in science. Statistics tests seem to be something where scientists unanimouslu agree. Another is models, and applying occam's razor to choose the one with less parameters. Perhaps one could also justify choosing a hypothesis on the basis that it is simpler.

They certainly don’t agree. There has been 30+ years of objection to p < .05. The fact that many scientists are statistically illiterate doesn’t constitute consensus.

They pretty much agree that statistics is the tool to use, but disagree on the (important) details.

Scientists (should) never really "agree", they just concede temporarily preparing their next attack. statistic tests are the de facto standard that everyone concedes to, and has not been replaced.

Richard Feynman said anything you can't prove yourself must be taken on pure faith and most of the public must take everything on pure faith as somehow they've left school without the faintest idea how basic stats work.

Feynman was talking to scientists. I do think that science has to provide answers, not just data. The public interprets every datum in a myriad of ways, and does not have a mechanism to establish consensus, hence you would end up with constant crisis.

Who says we're not in a constant crisis?

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