All these coding campaigns really piss me off. We should not be trying to teach kids how to write computer code. If people want to do it as a hobby—fine; if they want to get a real education and do it professionally—fine, but can we all stop pretending that everybody and their grandma needs to learn a programming language? They should learn something more useful instead, like how to communicate better, or more Math, or how to cook, or anything really. Programming was a major passion for me for almost a decade, and I still enjoy it, despite moving on to focus more on Math. I also think that a lot of us have an extremely bloated sense of self-worth, and think programming is far more valuable as a skill than it actually is. You can't program a computer to do something you can't do, so what we really need are people better at Math, communicating, analytical thought, and problem solving.

You completely missed the point of what he was saying; it isn't about working with numbers or not, but rather about how you verify your hypothesis. In real science, you aren't allowed to be wrong some of the time. If a theory ever fails, then you have to go back to he drawing board. You aren't allowed to be unsure either. It isn't good enough to say "we dropped a thousand objects in North America and measured their acceleration, and based on a p-value of 0.0005 we can infer that acceleration due to gravity is ~9.8 m/s/s" That's what he meant when he was talking about "really knowing something." The theory of gravity has changed over time, but at its heart, it tells you something fundamental about the universe. There are no studies in the Social Sciences that tell you something fundamental about humans; we are too complicated and our behaviour is too unpredictable. The Social Sciences are worthwhile, but they aren't the same as Science, and it hurts both disciplines to keep confusing them. We need to be more earnest about what we know for sure, and what we probably know.

I agree with you, but I also think there is an unhealthy reliance on statistics among researchers these days. In some cases, it's the best thing you've got, so you have to use it, but in other cases, people are just being intellectually lazy. I cringe every time I turn on the news, or look at a newspaper, or read an article online with a headline like "Science Proves It: visitng latin america reduces your risk of cancer by upto 35%". I wish I could reach through spacetime and slap that person silly. On the other hand, how much can I blame them for misrepresneting what the results actually mean when all of these papers these day make claims that aren't much better? We need to get back to finding hard evidence to support our hypothesis, instead of just throwing darts at it, and calling it good.