I’ve finally taken the courage to publicly ask whether psychologists (or empirical scientists in general) at all should continue to teach statistics. And I pinged some of the most prominent statistically skilled psychologists in the meta-science movement. See the Twitter thread.
My original tweet:
> Provocative question to all psychologists teaching statistics: Shouldn’t you just stop & let mathematically trained statisticians take over? Empirical research shows that psych’s teaching statistics don’t know statistics well enough. So how can still teaching it be justified?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this turned out to be a sore topic. And this is where I really want this forum to take over; having these types of discussions on Twitter is so frustrating; it’s so difficult/impossible to be polite enough while also trying to explain thoroughly.
So, trying to move the discussion here now and we’ll see how that works. And I’ll continue with one possible (provocative) interpretation and implementation of the responses I received from meta-scientists: If we as psychologists can teach statistics just as good (or even better, as some suggested) than mathematical statisticians, is mathematical statistics a superfluous scientific discipline?