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Comment by Perenti | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago I had the displeasure of attempting to teach statistical inference to psych students. My background is applied maths. Psychs tend to over-sample (so combined with step-wise regression can support _any_ hypothesis), over-test (so type II error rate is totally out of control) and mangle data, rejecting data that doesn't fit the hypothesis - I could go on.

I belive that the academic psychologists are desperate to be considered scientists and not voodoo practitioners. That's why their research is so loose.

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But is that the only way to do Psychology? Does for example William James or Freud or Jung use statistics for their analysis? I doubt.

I also had a Professor of Psychology, the Dean, tell me that "mathematicians don't understand statistics".

Can confirm, am mathematician.

It's not like I can't understand it, but it never attracted me enough to put in the work. (And I am quite put off by questions which require statistics to settle, which, yeah, I know, it's most of science.)

I'm an engineer, and while I found the rest of math doable but boring, I always found statistics so fascinating because it's so useful to understand the world.

> belive that the academic psychologists are desperate to be considered scientists

Well yes, they kinda have to, because if you aren't a scientist other people (like mathematicians) will look down at you. And if you cant show fancy formulas and statistics to show you proved things you are running into trouble getting funding, because you arent considered a science and thus not worth any money. Just look at the humanities, who are having an even harder time getting funding.

Yes!! I think it is to justify grant applications. Trouble is they're using stats as weasel words and the people who approve the grants have no idea.

> Just look at the humanities, who are having an even harder time getting funding.

Many people who do research in humanities are keen on spreading their left-wing political agenda. Couldn't this also be a huge part of the story why many people don't take humanities seriously?

If education tends to generate left-leaning ideology, maybe the people not taking them seriously are either just (a) right-leaning (b) uneducated or (c) both.

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