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Friday, December 11, 2009

Statistics in linguistics

People in linguistics tend to treat statistical theory as something that can be outsourced--we don't really need to know anything about the details, we just need to know which button to click.

People easily outsource statistical knowledge in an empirical paper, but the same people would be appalled if they hired an assistant to work out the technical details of syntactic theory for a syntax paper.

The statistics *is* the science, it's not some extra appendage that can be outsourced.