Andy Seaton

@aseaton.bsky.social

146 Followers 104 Following

Unemployed convalescent Honorary Fellow at the University of Glasgow

A screenshot of a paragraph from a piece of writing about statistics that reads: When the international community of physicists agreed on the statistical analysis they would perform on the data they collected at the Large Hadron Collider, they were doing statistics. But when they agreed what the conditions were for declaring the Higgs boson real or not, they were not really doing good statistics anymore. They were agreeing a position as a scientific community about when and how to leave an uncertain world and enter a new world with one new piece of certainty attached to it. The statistical work was one (small) piece of this decision making process. This community-driven process, viewed as a whole, should not, in my view, be seen as a part of statistics, though I understand that it looks like it could be. I should be really explicit here and emphasise that saying something is not statistics is not the thing same as saying that it is bad science.