… or the primacy of methodology. One team of scientists (led by David Kroodsma) published a study in the journal Science that concluded 55 percent of the world’s oceans are affected by fishing. Another group (led by Ricardo Amoroso), using the same underlying data (!), reached a drastically different conclusion: the actual value is closer to 4 percent. Ed Yong thus poses the salient following question in this excellent essay in The Atlantic: “How could two groups [of data scientists] have produced such wildly different answers using the same set of data?” In a word: methodology.
Image Credit: Global Fishing Watch
prior probability 