[Rockhounds] Inferring meaning where there is none by geologists

[Tim Fisher]

Welcome to the wonderful world of statistics. We deal with that constantly
and yes it's pretty tough to put 1000 hours or so into an analysis only to
fail to support your own hypothesis. And the journals make it worse, they
don't want to publish "our hypothesis wasn't proven by the evidence and it's
probably random chance" papers. They don't get cited as often which isn't
good for business. We've run into that a couple times and the paper winds up
in the "grey literature" realm which in turn no one wants to cite because it
wasn't published in a refereed journal. We'll be starting an analysis next
month that I have a feeling will nullify a prior paper we published 10 years
ago, or at least significantly change or weaken our inferences. Many times a
little extra data pushes the models past their breaking point.

Tim Fisher
Http://OreRockOn.com 
Email nospam at orerockon.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Rockhounds [mailto:rockhounds-bounces at rockhounds.drizzle.com] On
Behalf Of Paul
Sent: Saturday, June 01, 2019 2:09 PM
To: Rockhound List
Subject: [Rockhounds] Inferring meaning where there is none by geologists

Perceived connections: Inferring meaning where there is none
https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Geoscientist/Archive/Dec-2018/Feature-3

Meaningless data are tough words to swallow. John Armitage and Tom Coulthard
argue that Earth scientists must face up to the fact that some observations
might be an aggregation of seemingly random events, where there is no cause
and effect.

Papers

Armitage, J. & Coulthard, T., Perceived connections: Inferring meaning where
there is none. Geoscientist 28 (11), 18-21, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1144/geosci2018-030
https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/~/media/shared/documents/Geoscientist/2018/Decemb
er%202018/F3_Dec%202018.pdf?la=en

Falk, R. and Konold, C., 1997. Making sense of randomness: Implicit encoding
as a basis for judgment. Psychological Review, 104(2), p.301-318
https://www.srri.umass.edu/publications/falk-1997msr/
https://www.srri.umass.edu/sites/srri/files/FalkKonold1997/index.pdf

A related editorial well worth finding and reading is:

Wright, V.P., 2019. Memes, False News, and the Death of Empiricism.
Journal of Sedimentary Research, 89(4), pp.310-311.
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/sepm/jsedres/article-abstract/89/4/310/5700
50

Yours,

Paul H.



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