I grew up among physicists, whose modus operandi is to observe the world, experiment with it, develop hypotheses and theories and models, suggest further experiments, and use statistics to analyze the results, thereby comparing mental imaginings with actual events. Statistics is simply their tool for confirmation or denial.

But nowadays the world is increasingly in love with statistics and data science as a source of knowledge and truth itself. Some people have even claimed that computer-aided statistical analysis of patterns will replace our traditional methods of discovering the truth, not only in the social sciences and medicine, but in the natural sciences too. 

I believe we must be careful not to get too enamored of statistics and thereby abandon the classical methods of discovering the great truths about nature.

Science is a battle to find causes and explanations amidst the confusion of data. Let us not get too enamored of data science, whose great triumphs so far are mainly in advertising and persuasion. Data alone has no voice. Choosing what data to collect and how to think about it takes insight into the invisible; making good sense of the data collected requires the classic conservative methods: intuition, modeling, theorizing, and then, finally, statistics.

Emanuel Derman
Professor, Financial Engineering, Columbia University

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