Ernest Rutherford is famously quoted proclaiming “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”
“Of course, there is an existential problem arguing for large effect sizes. If most effect sizes are small or zero, then most interventions are useless. And this forces us scientists to confront our cosmic impotence, which remains a humbling and frustrating experience.”
Must be nice. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to carry out whatever experimentation they feel like. Sometimes we’re limited by what is affordable, practical, or ethical.
To take this further. Most science is a slave to grant funding. Grant funders like certain things and most of them are not biostatisticians.
That is not to say that hypercapitalism is the problem here. I think any competitive system even under socialism would have the exact same problem. Basically there are too many voices, and the ones winning are often cheating with bad statistics.
Ernest Rutherford is famously quoted proclaiming “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”
“Of course, there is an existential problem arguing for large effect sizes. If most effect sizes are small or zero, then most interventions are useless. And this forces us scientists to confront our cosmic impotence, which remains a humbling and frustrating experience.”