4 ms·

They are required courses for those degrees, so you might have a bad sample of people, or the field is simply bad at it entirely.

leemailll 11y ago
Since this is something about statistics and probability, I think enough samples for conclusion is required. ;) You can read an example (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6277/1037.2.long http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6277/1037.2.long, http://www.be-md.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26941311/#comments http://www.be-md.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26941311/#comments) I linked in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11325254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11325254). There are quite a few blogpost on this also, and if you allow me to shorten the story in one sentence, that is a comment on Science arguing a previous study on Science did the statistical analysis wrong is under the critics that the comment itself did statistical analysis wrong. And recently life sciences fields are in a "reproducibility" controversy which basically arises from education and application of the topic.
- niels_olson 11y ago
  I'm a physician, with an undergrad in physics. My research is very applied and very math heavy. When applying to med schools, I asked a couple very senior mathematicians at my college as to whether I should take a stats class. They assured me I would not need a stats class. The first time I got a biostats lecture in medical school, I genuinely questioned their advice. By the third class, I was convinced I knew nothing about math. Luckily our biochem prof was a physics major and assured me I didn't need to worry about the stats. Somewhere in residency, I realized I really had been getting all the stats questions right. But not because I did anything like the other residents. They have all these crazy stories and mnemonics to keep track of what kind of problem they're looking at. They seriously try to classify their way out of basic math. They classify. Everything. I now agree with my profs. I didn't need a stats class. But the stats education in medical school seems designed to convince physicians that they need statisticians. Which is probably a coup for biostatisticians, but it's a damn shame for physicians trying to break into research outside major academic centers.
  - ska 11y ago
    Irrelevant to your main point - I am surprised you didn't have at least an intro to probability and statistics, and later a statistical mechanics course as part of a physics undergrad curriculum. Relevant to your main point - I have worked with many clinicians. Most of them have had a fairly tenuous grasp of the statistics they were working with, which matches your experience in training I think. A couple had much better understanding, but had driven that education themselves.
    - niels_olson 11y ago
      Yes, we took a statistical mechanics course senior year, deriving Gibbs free energy from buckets of 1s and 0s, etc. Brutal class.
      - ska 11y ago
        Ah, good. Had me worried there for a moment ! It is true that depending on how statistical mechanics is taught, it can be difficult to connect to other statistical reasoning (the distributions are "nice", you have a gazillion measurements, and your population sampling doesn't tend to have bias issues, etc.)
peter_hobbit 11y ago
> They are required courses for those degrees How can you possibly say that? Are you familiar with the course prerequisites for every biology and medicine degree in the world off the top of your head?
- niels_olson 11y ago
  Medical school hopefuls are a major source, probably the major source, of biology undergrads, and the pre-reqs for medical school, with few exceptions, are standardized under the AAMC. It's 2 semesters of calc, no stats required. And quite frankly, the PPV trope is just that, a trope. The biostatisticians found a little trick to lord over their masters. If you only have 15 seconds to solve after reading the question, and you know you only do this once every 6 months, and you know most people get it wrong, answer C, next question. Christ, the story that docs suck at stats is part of medical education. They don't teach biostatistics, they teach "you suck at biostats".
  - peter_hobbit 11y ago
    Are you aware that some people live outside the United States?
xaa 11y ago
Nope, PhD in bioinformatics here and never took a single (formal) statistics course. There was Statistics I required for my undergrad, which I AP'ed out of by reading the book for a few hours. Nothing whatsoever in grad school. It's horrible and badly needs to be change. I've had to do a lot of extracurricular statistics to get up to speed but a disturbingly large portion of people don't. People generally know t-tests and maybe ANOVA, and that's about it. Of course they don't know any of the theory behind it and often just apply t-tests to everything, even when inappropriate.

leemailll 11y ago

Since this is something about statistics and probability, I think enough samples for conclusion is required. ;) You can read an example (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6277/1037.2.long http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6277/1037.2.long, http://www.be-md.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26941311/#comments http://www.be-md.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26941311/#comments) I linked in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11325254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11325254). There are quite a few blogpost on this also, and if you allow me to shorten the story in one sentence, that is a comment on Science arguing a previous study on Science did the statistical analysis wrong is under the critics that the comment itself did statistical analysis wrong. And recently life sciences fields are in a "reproducibility" controversy which basically arises from education and application of the topic.

niels_olson 11y ago
I'm a physician, with an undergrad in physics. My research is very applied and very math heavy. When applying to med schools, I asked a couple very senior mathematicians at my college as to whether I should take a stats class. They assured me I would not need a stats class. The first time I got a biostats lecture in medical school, I genuinely questioned their advice. By the third class, I was convinced I knew nothing about math. Luckily our biochem prof was a physics major and assured me I didn't need to worry about the stats. Somewhere in residency, I realized I really had been getting all the stats questions right. But not because I did anything like the other residents. They have all these crazy stories and mnemonics to keep track of what kind of problem they're looking at. They seriously try to classify their way out of basic math. They classify. Everything. I now agree with my profs. I didn't need a stats class. But the stats education in medical school seems designed to convince physicians that they need statisticians. Which is probably a coup for biostatisticians, but it's a damn shame for physicians trying to break into research outside major academic centers.
- ska 11y ago
  Irrelevant to your main point - I am surprised you didn't have at least an intro to probability and statistics, and later a statistical mechanics course as part of a physics undergrad curriculum. Relevant to your main point - I have worked with many clinicians. Most of them have had a fairly tenuous grasp of the statistics they were working with, which matches your experience in training I think. A couple had much better understanding, but had driven that education themselves.
  - niels_olson 11y ago
    Yes, we took a statistical mechanics course senior year, deriving Gibbs free energy from buckets of 1s and 0s, etc. Brutal class.
    - ska 11y ago
      Ah, good. Had me worried there for a moment ! It is true that depending on how statistical mechanics is taught, it can be difficult to connect to other statistical reasoning (the distributions are "nice", you have a gazillion measurements, and your population sampling doesn't tend to have bias issues, etc.)

peter_hobbit 11y ago

> They are required courses for those degrees How can you possibly say that? Are you familiar with the course prerequisites for every biology and medicine degree in the world off the top of your head?

niels_olson 11y ago
Medical school hopefuls are a major source, probably the major source, of biology undergrads, and the pre-reqs for medical school, with few exceptions, are standardized under the AAMC. It's 2 semesters of calc, no stats required. And quite frankly, the PPV trope is just that, a trope. The biostatisticians found a little trick to lord over their masters. If you only have 15 seconds to solve after reading the question, and you know you only do this once every 6 months, and you know most people get it wrong, answer C, next question. Christ, the story that docs suck at stats is part of medical education. They don't teach biostatistics, they teach "you suck at biostats".
- peter_hobbit 11y ago
  Are you aware that some people live outside the United States?

xaa 11y ago

Nope, PhD in bioinformatics here and never took a single (formal) statistics course. There was Statistics I required for my undergrad, which I AP'ed out of by reading the book for a few hours. Nothing whatsoever in grad school. It's horrible and badly needs to be change. I've had to do a lot of extracurricular statistics to get up to speed but a disturbingly large portion of people don't. People generally know t-tests and maybe ANOVA, and that's about it. Of course they don't know any of the theory behind it and often just apply t-tests to everything, even when inappropriate.