Opinion: It’s the end of science as we know it, and I feel fine

A few years ago, my lab published a study comparing memory complaints across racial groups. We matched participants on age, IQ, socioeconomic status, depression, genetics — everything we’d been trained to match on. We ran them through the most sophisticated statistical machinery I knew. And we got a finding that felt righteous: proof that the assessments were biased. I was proud of it. My name was first author. It took me two more years to realize what we’d actually done. We’d stripped our participants of every variable that made them human beings in order to make them statistically comparable — and in doing so, we’d erased exactly the context we needed to understand what was happening. The paper told a clean story. The world it claimed to describe was not clean. And that just ain’t science.Read the rest…