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> Aside: I'm surprised that the FAANGs haven't revolutionized statistics yet. What does that even mean?

Balgair 7y ago
Like, with QM, we had the time and equipment to start pointing radium at some gold foil. We came up with some surprising results. With economics, we finally got enough data in to say that people really are not rational at all. With biology, we finally got the time and equipment to poke audio amplifiers into rabbit brains and some strange stuff happened. Etc. Similarly, with all this 'big data', I would have guessed that we would have come up with something kinda like that. Finally, we have all this stuff coming in. It's all fairly well captured, fairly well correlated, and fairly valuable so you can pay people to just screw around in the labs and see what drops out.
- garmaine 7y ago
  One of those stands out as different from the others: statistics. It's a branch of math. It's fundamental. We've proven its properties to be comprehensive, such that any other formulation with the same basic axioms would do the same thing. It's not like when we got a lot of experience gathering physical data we suddenly realized we were doing integrals and derivatives wrong.
  - Balgair 7y ago
    I mean sort-of? Math is a brach of logic, sure, but the computer has acted like a microscope for math already. We can more easily check our conjectures and see if they hold true. Also, we've been able to communicate better, so that has helped out math as well. Even though math is 'above' us little humans, the day-to-day work of mathematicians has been helped out a lot, even in the small ways of not having to lug your mortal-coil through the library stacks. So, with all this big data, I'd have guessed that we could have seen more edge cases with statistics. Little areas where someone said 'huh that's funny'.
- asdff 7y ago
  There has always been high level statistics and theoretical modeling going on in biology. Biology is a vast field, encompassing field work to lab work to clinical work to computer science to quantum physics and theoretical math in the context of evolution and population genetics.

Like, with QM, we had the time and equipment to start pointing radium at some gold foil. We came up with some surprising results. With economics, we finally got enough data in to say that people really are not rational at all. With biology, we finally got the time and equipment to poke audio amplifiers into rabbit brains and some strange stuff happened. Etc. Similarly, with all this 'big data', I would have guessed that we would have come up with something kinda like that. Finally, we have all this stuff coming in. It's all fairly well captured, fairly well correlated, and fairly valuable so you can pay people to just screw around in the labs and see what drops out.

garmaine 7y ago
One of those stands out as different from the others: statistics. It's a branch of math. It's fundamental. We've proven its properties to be comprehensive, such that any other formulation with the same basic axioms would do the same thing. It's not like when we got a lot of experience gathering physical data we suddenly realized we were doing integrals and derivatives wrong.
- Balgair 7y ago
  I mean sort-of? Math is a brach of logic, sure, but the computer has acted like a microscope for math already. We can more easily check our conjectures and see if they hold true. Also, we've been able to communicate better, so that has helped out math as well. Even though math is 'above' us little humans, the day-to-day work of mathematicians has been helped out a lot, even in the small ways of not having to lug your mortal-coil through the library stacks. So, with all this big data, I'd have guessed that we could have seen more edge cases with statistics. Little areas where someone said 'huh that's funny'.
asdff 7y ago
There has always been high level statistics and theoretical modeling going on in biology. Biology is a vast field, encompassing field work to lab work to clinical work to computer science to quantum physics and theoretical math in the context of evolution and population genetics.