I think that the article is unfair to statisticians in saying that they ignore descriptive statistics. The problem is that one cannot choose systematically betw

I think that the article is unfair to statisticians in saying that they ignore descriptive statistics. The problem is that one cannot choose systematically between different descriptive statistics without clearly specifying our objectives and what we believe about the data-generating process. Otherwise on what grounds can you say that the median is 'better' than the mean or the other way round? But once you specify these things you are doing statistical estimation, which is a major branch of mathematical statistics.