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A comment on Study shows salaries of young women 8% higher than men in peer group (2010). Parent comment

Re:Study shows salaries of young women 8% higher than men in... by tomp on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @09:22AM (#16744358)
> You cannot dismiss rigorous statistical analysis by arguing it can never encompass the full dimensions of the data.

This simply means it's not rigorous. See Omitted-variable bias - from [1]: The bias results in the model attributing the effect of the missing variables to the estimated effects of the included variables. For example, including gender but not education or hours worked will result in attributing pay differences to gender, but including all relevant variables shows that's gender is irrelevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omitted-variable_bias

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Re:Study shows salaries of young women 8% higher than men in... by dwaltrip on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @10:19AM (#16744819)
You entirely missed the point. We can never include every single relevant variable to perfectly explain the observation. It's impossible.

This doesn't mean statistics is useless.

This is the meaning of the phrase "the map is not the territory". All models are flawed, but some are useful.

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Re:Study shows salaries of young women 8% higher than men in... by mseebach on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @10:50AM (#16745139)
No, statistics aren't useless, but its usefulness cuts both ways: if you can add one or two relevant variables and almost entirely remove the observation, then statistics tells you that the observation was only there due to omitted-variable bias.
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Re:Study shows salaries of young women 8% higher than men in... by dwaltrip on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @03:22PM (#16748179)
Sure, that's fine. That's part of using statistics to the best of our ability.
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Re:Study shows salaries of young women 8% higher than men in... by fwdpropaganda on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @10:23AM (#16744867)
I think there's some middle ground between saying that the analysis is rigorous and saying it's useless, no?
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Re:Study shows salaries of young women 8% higher than men in... by dwaltrip on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @10:35AM (#16744996)
Indeed. But that's where all the hard work is -- trying to determine how rigorous something is, knowing it certainly isn't perfectly rigorous.
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