I find few people are willing to embrace the more consistent statistical preference plus agnosticism, rather they play the game of “statistical noise for thee but not for me.”
He is writing about what is now a seemingly ancient question about the stock market’s reaction to the ups and downs of Mr. Trump. I want to say that this issue illustrates Merle Kling’s three laws of social science.
1. Sometimes it’s this way and sometimes it’s that way. In this case, sometimes one can find an affect of a change in Mr. Trump’s prospects and the market, and sometimes one cannot.
2. The data are insufficient. In this case, there is not enough data to make a definitive judgment.
3. The methodology is flawed. In this case, one can argue that the analyst is basing a conclusion on statistical noise.
Maybe the quote from Tyler suggests a fourth iron law: if the issue is emotionally salient, given that the first three iron laws hold, motivated reasoning and confirmation bias take over.
Statistics seems to be mostly a way of shutting down knowledge these days. Who doesn’t have some “study” that they believe shows whatever they wanted it to show before they read it. There is a huge market for producing studies that show, or property to show, what people want. It’s pretty common to find studies supporting opposite sides of many issues.
I fear that “studies show” has become the new “God wills it”. All of the certainty of science in what is really just faith (at best). Moreover, it makes it so that only the keepers of the faith (social scientists) get to decide what is and isn’t true. Common sense is determined to be useless, and the man on the street can’t have an opinion because he doesn’t have a study (or his studies are the wrong studies, say gatekeepers).
http://i.imgur.com/6rYgKhn.jpg
In A Demon of Our Own Design, the author explains that most intraday price movements are a result of demand for liquidity. It seems silly to base any conclusions on price movements over the course of a short debate. Also, weren’t there plenty of polls that showed viewers felt Trump won the debate (I thought I saw reports showing polls favoring either candidate)?
Seeing patterns in clouds: apophenia. Attributing a specific cause to the behavior of a complex system is usually driven by personal bias.