Gus,
You are making a defense of studying distributions as they are thrown at us
by nature/circumstances, This seem the way to go to social scientists
because we tend to believe that our causes are embedded in all sorts of
complex interactions and can not be isolated from their context, If we look
however to the physical sciences, we see a very different strategy, The
chemist tends not to go out and perform experiments on naturally occuring
clusters of chemicals, Instead, she isolates each chemical and then studies
their interactions in pure states, so that the fundamental mechanisms of
causation are revealed, The experimental psychologist does the same thing
in his lab, Both tend to use manipulation and anova designs, in which equal
cell sizes are sought across the levels of the factors, By doing so they
experimentalist progresses systematically by carefully controling his
research,
I am simply saying that those who wish to pursue causal models without
manipulation should learn something about the control afforded by isolation
of variables, Do you think it is wooly minded for a user of an anova design
to seek out equal cell sizes across the levels of the putative factor?
Bill Chambers
===========================================================================
This list is open to everyone. Occasionally, people lacking respect
for other members of the list send messages that are inappropriate
or unrelated to the list's discussion topics. Please just delete the
offensive email.
For information concerning the list, please see the following web page:
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
===========================================================================
