[trabant00]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I am sure there are plenty of people who misunderstand or misinterpret statistics. But in my experience these are mostly consumers. The people who produce "science" know damn well what they are doing.

This is not a scientific problem. This is a people problem.

[bb86754]

I haven't found this to be true at all. In fact, I'd say the majority of studies I read - even from prestigious journals - is fraught with bad statistics. I have no idea how some of these studies were even allowed to be published. Some fields are worse than others, but it's still a huge problem pretty much across the board.

People conduct science, and a lot of those people don't understand statistics that well. This quote from nearly 100 years ago still rings true in my experience:

"To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of."

- Ronald Fisher (1938)

[chimeracoder]

> I am sure there are plenty of people who misunderstand or misinterpret statistics. But in my experience these are mostly consumers. The people who produce "science" know damn well what they are doing.

As a statistician, I could not disagree more. I would venture to say that most uses of statistics by scientists that I see are fallacious in some way. It doesn't always invalidate the results, but that doesn't change the fact that it is built on a fallacy nonetheless.

In general, most scientists actually have an extremely poor grasp of statistics. Most fields require little more than a single introductory course to statistics with calculus (the same one required for pre-med students), and the rest they learn in an ad-hoc manner - often incorrectly.