Science is hard

I read Nate Silver’s online news service FiveThirtyEight just about every day. Nice, insightful news backed by research and data analysis rather than random opinions and emotion. This morning I read a fantastic piece called Science Isn’t Broken that talks about why establishing causation and predicting outcomes in the social sciences is hard. Until I got to know some social scientists, I had no idea how hard. It’s a lengthy read, but it does an outstanding job of describing the pitfalls social science researchers deal with every day. Cool stuff and worth a read.