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0 pointsastazangasta9y ago0 comments

You obviously don't hang out with many statisticians, who also don't tend to believe in truth or being right or wrong; to them, they are just making models that can be tested to reliably approximate some observation. There is no pretense at truth, it's just a model.

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yummyfajitas9y ago

This is a significant misunderstanding of statistics. Statisticians believe in truth, they just accept that it might not be possible to know it.

astazangastaOP9y ago

I think we have a disagreement about epistemology. I say, you can't believe in truth if you don't believe it is knowable.

In any case, statisticians are not interested in learning the truth, either, and the goal of their enterprise is not access to it.

yummyfajitas9y ago

The entire goal of statistics is to build approximations which converge to truth in some manner or another. E.g., a Bayesian posterior ideally converges to a delta measure on truth as N -> infty. A frequentist point estimate converges to truth (with P = 1) as N -> infty.

The entire purpose of statistics is to quantify the difference between our beliefs and actual truth.

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0 pointsastazangasta9y ago0 comments

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yummyfajitas9y ago

This is a significant misunderstanding of statistics. Statisticians believe in truth, they just accept that it might not be possible to know it.

astazangastaOP9y ago

I think we have a disagreement about epistemology. I say, you can't believe in truth if you don't believe it is knowable.

In any case, statisticians are not interested in learning the truth, either, and the goal of their enterprise is not access to it.

yummyfajitas9y ago

The entire purpose of statistics is to quantify the difference between our beliefs and actual truth.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse