HappySqurriel said:
The social sciences (for the most part) don't use statistics, they abuse it. Which is quite remarkable because statistics is an unfortunately necessary abomination of mathematics. When using statistics correctly you're always very open about the uncertainty of what you're saying because you can not prove anything is true with statistics; you can only demonstrate that they're likely to be true. The vast majority of papers published in the social sciences would never be published in a reputable scientific journal because they lack statistical rigour; and in many (probably most) cases this is on purpose because they would never be able to make the claims they're making if they had to approach the problem in a scientific way. |
I wouldn't go so far as to say most.
Though most of the ones that make headlines work that way.








