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Statistics Seminar
August 29, 2025 | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Location: 2203 SAS Hall, NC State Main Campus
Speaker: Kevin Gross
Professor
Statistics Department
North Carolina State University
Title: Towards a social theory of statistics: Some reflections on the beginning, middle, and end of my career
Abstract: When we talk about how science works, we usually focus on the so-called scientific method, stressing observation, data analysis, and hypothesis testing. What we don’t talk about much is how science works as a social process. What are the norms and institutions that govern scientific activity? What incentives do they create for individual researchers? How do those incentives shape the questions that scientists ask and the approaches they take? How do scientists work collectively to develop ever-improving models of the physical and natural world? How is scientific consensus formed—and what is it in the first place? How does statistical theory facilitate or impede scientific discovery? What role should it play? All of these questions and more fall under the umbrella of an emerging field that some call the “science of science”. In this talk, I will discuss one view of the science of science, present a case study concerning the longevity of peer review, and brazenly opine about how the science of science might intersect usefully with the discipline of statistics.