The state of statistics in the sciences isn't great, and young researchers often feel helpless against the incentives, culture, and overall inertia that perpetuates the poor practices. But there much that can be done! An impromptu thread.
One thing that you can do is to find researchers who you think are making a difference and promote their work. Share their preprints and publications with colleagues and suggest the works for journal clubs (also, start a journal club!).
Suggest them as invited speakers to those organizing local seminars and conferences. Find the prizes in your field and nominate them for any that seem appropriate. The success of these will always depend on the gatekeepers but the conversation alone can be really powerful.
Speaking of conversations, ask your advisors and other senior researchers why the training options are so limited. Don't accuse anyone of failing to provide those opportunities but rather make it clear that there is significant demand.
Perhaps the biggest limitation to getting things done is money. You want to know a secret? Below a thousand dollars or so funding opportunities are pretty ample in many academic departments but they're rarely exploited because of bureaucracy.
Talk to the senior researchers in your department about what they'd be okay funding in principle and then talk to the admin staff in the department and the school in general. Once you find the procedures for handling funds you might be surprised at the possibilities!
For example, a certain someone may have spent the time to work out how to spend department money on alcohol-related events and then used that knowledge to host cocktail mixers to get the junior and senior researchers talking to each other within and without individual labs.
Besides social events see how feasible it is to acquire funds to attend statistics trainings or hire statistics consultants to help robustify your analyses. This has the added benefit of sustaining researchers who provide those services but aren't supported by academia.
Given enough interest you might be able to organize a training for your lab or department, or perhaps even your field at the main conferences. Once you do the work to get around logistical barriers there are all kinds of opportunities.
Speaking of your field, don't hesitate to send polite letters to those in leadership in your fields professional societies and funding agencies. There are plenty of obstinate people in both, but if you're not speaking out then those receptive won't be aware of the interest.
Just remember that people say no because they don't want to deal with the overhead of saying yes almost as much as they say no because they're assholes. And they often don't say yes because they're not even aware of the requests.
So take the initiative and see what you can do about removing that overhead and politely making requests to facilitate the opportunities of which senior people may never have ever though.
