Long ago when I was a physics grad student, I distinctly remember that when someone introduced Bayesian statistics in a talk, it was because they were trying to justify weeding outliers from their data by hand. And they always got called to task on it.
I think that it’s right to call out scientists who think that math is reality.
We made math up, end of story. The “Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics“ is obvious selection bias.
Math, statistics, is a tool. I don’t expect my shovel to be a dowsing rod, and I don’t expect my bayesian methods to predict the future. But, shovels do dig wells and probably does, on average, work out; neither is worthy of being disregarded. But, there have literally been folks since Pythagoras‘s time who believe that logic, and math, are The Truth. Like, God: The Truth. Like, it works because it’s the way that nature is, and we understand and control it and itis math… a “Natural Law”.
A better scientific mind does not fall for such folly. The “outliers” are the very phenomena that science wants to study. If we can explain the outliers through an error in method, fine. But, if the outliers are not able to be explained then we would never want to gloss over them because they don’t fit our expectations of a mathematical model of reality.
andreareina|3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33078012
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2022/10/03/what-are-the-odds/
analog31|3 years ago
vonwoodson|3 years ago
Math, statistics, is a tool. I don’t expect my shovel to be a dowsing rod, and I don’t expect my bayesian methods to predict the future. But, shovels do dig wells and probably does, on average, work out; neither is worthy of being disregarded. But, there have literally been folks since Pythagoras‘s time who believe that logic, and math, are The Truth. Like, God: The Truth. Like, it works because it’s the way that nature is, and we understand and control it and it is math… a “Natural Law”.
A better scientific mind does not fall for such folly. The “outliers” are the very phenomena that science wants to study. If we can explain the outliers through an error in method, fine. But, if the outliers are not able to be explained then we would never want to gloss over them because they don’t fit our expectations of a mathematical model of reality.