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By Seth Roberts | June 20th 2007 04:23 PM | 1 comment | Print | E-mail | Track Comments

The word is black-and-white-ism. For instance:


Paul Berman’s chief problem as a thinker is black-and-white-ism, and this is a good example of his failure to make subtle distinctions.


Scientists are guilty of black-and-white-ism all the time: this statistic is wrong, that way of doing things is a mistake, and so on. John Tukey wrote about this tendency in a paper called Analyzing data: Sanctification or detective work?

If you believe data analysis is sanctification, there are indeed right ways and wrong ways, as with any ritual. But if science is not a set of rituals, talking about right and wrong confuses graduate students — who begin to think science is a set of rituals — and restricts what you can do. After you say something is wrong, it is harder to do it.


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Hank's picture
I always like to keep The Significance of Significance bookmarked as a way of keeping perspective.

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