

Why Facebook should hire astronomers - auvi
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/the-dayside/why-facebook-should-hire-astronomers-a-dayside-post?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Physics+Today&utm_campaign=4881967_Physics+Today%3a+The+week+in+Physics+20-24+October&dm_i=1Y69,2WMY7,HPHT5S,AIANM,1

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sqrt17
Much research in corpus linguistics or computational linguistics occurs on
data that naturally occurred. It's part of the traditions in psychology to
manipulate your subjects because that's the only way you can get more direct
observation of suspected cause/effect relations, especially when those are
subtle enough to go under in the noise in "in the wild" data.

Given a big enough sample size and a multi-factorial model (i.e. a model that
models all confounding factors as well as the variable you're interested in),
the importance of manipulation should decrease, and many astronomers,
economists, or computational linguists would be able to draw meaningful
inferences in such a study. Psychologists may have gotten too used to the idea
of "get experimental subjects, present with manipulated input, do comparison
statistics" to consider a purely observational study as the default.

tl;dr: It's not just astronomers, many fields do empirical studies without
manipulating their subjects in a Skinner-ian fashion.

