I’ve worked as a scientist for around 10 years (and as a research programmer in various labs for 5-6 years before that) and have never done a standard deviation calculation.
See, when I was in grad school I once had to calculate an agreement metric from a bunch of labels on a corpus. No problem I said, the math is easy, I can write a script in an hour or so. Fam that mfing script took me two freaking days bc there were always some little bugs or weird edge cases I hadn’t thought of. So the deal I made with myself was: I would use Matlab or a stats library or something like that, BUT I would make sure that I understood the math beforehand.
But for whatever reason, I never had to calculate a standard deviation. Thinking about it, someone else might have done that for papers I was co-author on, though.
Plenty of people thought that I will be a scientist but I did one standard deviation calculation for a test and noped out of the idea.
I’ve worked as a scientist for around 10 years (and as a research programmer in various labs for 5-6 years before that) and have never done a standard deviation calculation.
Because the automated tools do it for you, right?
Right???
See, when I was in grad school I once had to calculate an agreement metric from a bunch of labels on a corpus. No problem I said, the math is easy, I can write a script in an hour or so. Fam that mfing script took me two freaking days bc there were always some little bugs or weird edge cases I hadn’t thought of. So the deal I made with myself was: I would use Matlab or a stats library or something like that, BUT I would make sure that I understood the math beforehand.
But for whatever reason, I never had to calculate a standard deviation. Thinking about it, someone else might have done that for papers I was co-author on, though.