In a write-up in Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics, in 1935, Tagore referred to the magic of mathematics as “the dance steps of numbers in the arena of time and space, which weave the maya of appearance, the incessant flow of changes that ever is and is not”. As today’s data-obsessed world aspires to make data-driven decisions on every bit of life and lifestyle, one has to determine how the “maya” is woven and what data might genuinely offer.
Analyses and findings
An example first. The findings of a study that provided independent analysts with nearly four million words from roughly 8,000 comments in an online academic forum were described in a paper in Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes (2021) by a large collaborative group of scientists. The study posed two straightforward hypotheses about how gender and academic status influence contributions to the forum’s discussions. Within 29 studies, radically varied analyses and dispersed empirical findings were reported; several cases had significant effects in opposite directions for the same research question. Had it been only a single analyst using a single method, one would have stopped at that result.
