Computers are great at arithmetic. People are great at judgment. Give the calculator the heavy lifting, keep the meaning for yourself. Whether you use SPSS, Excel, or a notebook, the workflow is the same: define the question, choose the right test, run it, then decide. The software can’t pick your hypothesis, your confidence level, or the consequence of being wrong. That’s your job. It also won’t stop you from feeding it nonsense… wrong columns, wrong scales, wrong tails. So create guardrails: explicit hypotheses, clear variable names, and a final sniff test… “Do these numbers make sense?” Tools don’t make decisions… people do. Let the machine be your engine, not your pilot.
