tl;dr: Please don’t insult an entire community via bathroom analogies, then claim to speak for what they want. The words and attitudes of senior scientists have profound implications for the state of the field and lives and careers of junior scientists.

Dear all,

Recently, the community entered a fury of discussion based on a few comments made by prominent members of the community. Some of these tweets really bothered me and pointed to profound ignorance about the role of statistics and lack of sympathy for statisticians. Let me address a few of these tweets:

Doing statistics should be like going to the bathroom. Yes, you have to do it. Yes, when you do it, you want to do it right. But don’t make a big deal out of it, be careful about telling other people how to do it, and if your whole life is centered on it, there’s something wrong.

Statistics is not going to the bathroom.

I am appalled that a senior scientist takes pride in willful ignorance and then insults an entire community of researchers before “apologizing” by claiming to speak for that community (of which I am a member):

And dividing and conquering, bringing statisticians onto our papers in author roles raises problems. There aren’t enough statisticians to serve as authors and reviewers on all our papers. And it’s limiting for the statisticians themselves, as they spend less time in lead roles.

In my experience, it goes the other way: methods people are willing to take on such roles, but are unable to find academic jobs and thus are forced into the private sector.

Or as a different senior scientist told me a few years ago, “methods people don’t get [academic] jobs” – such prophecies are by their nature self-fulfilling.

I suspect part of the reason psychology and psycholinguistics are so willing to accept statistical incompetence and malpractice is that it doesn’t matter if the statistics are wrong. Nobody will die. But countless careers and young minds will be wasted chasing noise, as the replication crisis has shown us.

Or to use the original toilet humor: your (statistical) hygiene practices in your private (data) space can have big implications for the health of the broader community. As we all learned in 2020, it’s important to listen to experts and follow best practices.

Phillip Alday