it doesn’t really work very well, for example, in the social sciences. For example, my own personal experience–as you will realize, there is an awful lot of studying of the methods of education going on, particularly of the teaching of arithmetic–but if you try to find out what is really known about what is the better way to teach arithmetic than some other way, you will discover that there is an enormous number of studies and a great deal of statistics, but they are all disconnected from one another and they are mixtures of anecdotes, uncontrolled experiments, and very poorly controlled
...more
