Efron on statisticians

A wonderful interview with Brad Efron (Stanford statistics professor) should be read in full at Significance magazine. The following quotes caught my attention.

First, he addresses the impact of "big data" on the scientific method:

scientists have misled themselves into thinking hat if you collect enormous amounts of data you are bound to get the right answer. You are not bound to get the right answer unless you are enormously smart.

they'll [cosmologists] will argue not about nature but about what they saw in the simulation.

Here, he explains what is a "second-level science":

the history of science is that we solve the easy problems first, the ones that were very hard-edged and that didn't need any statistics or probability, and one by one those fields were conquered and now they are leaning down on us [statisticians]. Very much more complicated things are being studied, including things that aren't in nature. So there is a science in nature and science beyond nature, and I think we are into the second.

And he thinks we're all cynics:

Statisicians are cynics, because you realise how much of the stuff that you are told is true in the world is actually just that month's accident that worked out, or that month's disaster that happened.