[先補個學界脈絡]
A combination of technological change, methodological drift and a certain degree of intellectual sloth and sloppiness, particularly with respect to philosophy of science, has allowed contemporary quantitative political methodology to accumulate a series of highly dysfunctional habits that have rendered a great deal of contemporary research more or less scientically useless.
[量化研究七宗原罪]
Kitchen sink models that ignore the effects of collinearity;
Pre-scientic explanation in the absence of prediction;
Reanalyzing the same data sets until they scream;
Using complex methods without understanding the underlying assumptions;
Interpreting frequentist statistics as if they were Bayesian;
Linear statistical monoculture at the expense of alternative structures;
Confusing statistical controls and experimental controls.
[非常中肯的解方]
The cure for this is not to reject quantitative methods|and the cure is most certainly not a postmodernist nihilistic rejection of all systematic method──but rather to return to some fundamentals, and take on some hard problems rather than expecting to advance knowledge solely through the ever-increasing application of fast-twitch muscle fibers to computer mice [...]The answer to these problems is solid, thoughtful, original work driven by an appreciation of both theory and data. Not postmodernism.