Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Sociological phlogiston.
At least 90% of modern science is doing just enough window dressing so that your just-so story can be accepted as “scientific.”
This is a big reason why p-values are so popular, despite even some statistical journals saying that they should be used sparingly: they are an automated way to get a number that sounds scientific and allows you to go off on your story. So many papers have the form of “we looked at one test statistic and p <.05. Therefore we conclude that things must have occurred according to this very specific narrative, no part of which we tested beyond trying to establish that one measure ‘didn’t occur due to chance.'”