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What your choice of statistics software says about you

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Sean Taylor, a PhD candidate in Information Systems at NYU’s Stern School of Business, describes the "Statistics Software Signal" and his observation that some software packages are correlated with bad science. While, I don't agree with all of his points (some fine analyses have been done with Stata, for example), I thought this was an interesting take on the R language:

When operating software doesn’t require a lot of training, users of that software are likely to be poorly trained. This is an adverse selection issue. Researchers who care about statistics enough should have gravitated toward R at some point.  I also trust results produced using R, not because it is better software, but because it is difficult to learn.  The software is not causing you to be a better scientist, but better scientists will be using it.

You can also read his list a of what your choice of statistical software pacakge (SAS, SPSS, Matlab, Julia and more) says about you, at the link below.

decomposition: The Statistics Software Signal

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