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I happen to tell people I’m a statistician—because it’s true, and because I didn’t learn from the first 10,000 times someone heard that, turned around, and left
by bertil 3y ago
I happen to tell people I’m a statistician—because it’s true, and because I didn’t learn from the first 10,000 times someone heard that, turned around, and left without a word. The always run away, except in one case… If they stay, I know they are
a. a Ph.D. Student and
b. having a very bad time and therefore
c. about to ask me pointed questions about their methodology section, what is a t-value and a p-score, why there are two xis, and whether it’s too late to prevent Bonferonni, Hochberg, Holmes, Benjamini, and Šídák from ever publishing they terrible ideas. (Yes.)
I’ve been confronted with utter confusion in every field of knowledge, including art history, and literature. It’s a miracle we make any progress in science, but I wholeheartedly blame *how we teach statistics*. It’s, at best, a dark cult that requires sacrifices to obscure gods, and most likely three cargo cults in a trench coat. Conditioning scientific discussion to passing under the Caudine forks of Greek letters incantations isn’t helping us. We need a reform.
There is no problem with people looking at black holes, counting cells in a Petri dish, or trying to define inflation. If it hurts when you touch your forehead, your thigh, your elbow, and your knee, it means your finger is broken. There is one thing in common between all those people: the three-hour elective on stats taught by someone who had the social skills of a door hinge, the clarity of VentaBlack, and the patience of a toddler on cocaine.
There are amazing statisticians who explain things beautifully. Get them to teach, and people will finally grok uncertainty. They’ll see how clumsy are most of the methodologies pre-approved by reviewers because it was used in the same journal before. We ask the most critical minds of our generation to challenge the status-quo. They know how. They just need to know what the status-quo actually means.
- taeric 3y agoI'd push that it isn't just statistics. It is finding a way to overcome any learned experience and expectations. I remember people having a hard time understanding that the reason things fall behind the car when you toss them out the window is 100% air friction. To the point that many in my college classes would get that basic question wrong. Or, for fun, show an image of someone spinning a rock on a string overhead, ask what happens when they let go of the string with an arrow for where the rock will go. Nevermind how many of us (myself included) have a hard time with the idea that .9999.. equals 1. Even more amusing when you consider few have trouble with .3333... * 3 doing so. Yes, statistics can be particularly difficult to really internalize. I'm not entirely convinced it is uniquely difficult.
- bertil 3y agoProbably. I just happen to have had the most incredible physics teachers, and I know elite engineering schools do too: Feynman, that Eastern European lady who is way too loud and excited about science, the “let’s see if conservation of movement works, or if that bowling ball will crush my skull” guy. Every school had more than one. Steve Mould is a gift from above, but not a unique one… On the other hand what Randal Monroe from xkcd and Grant Sanderson from 3blue1Brown have alluded to, that felt like witchcraft unlike anything I’ve seen in class. I went to what should be one of the most demanding schools for statistics and it took me years to make sense of it. Re-opening my notes after things clicked was earth-shaking. And it wasn’t specific to the school: we also had economics teacher, and they were incredible: hilarious, terrifying, unforgettable. “Our task is to forecast inflation. We have tried many approach, mainly macroeconomics and bone reading. Bone reading was more accurate, but the minister didn’t think it involved enough suffering.” How do you forget that?
- taeric 3y agoLove the suffering joke! I do think that most physics benefits from the empirical nature of being able to test ideas. Statistics is tough because you can't really empirically test a lot of distributions. And then a ton of us (again, myself included) have a hard time seeing the subtle differences introduced with some framings. The Monty Hall one is hilarious for just how upset so many people get on being wrong on it. Note that I think with modern computers, you can start to test more distributions in simulations than you could dream of in the past. Has some of its own problems, of course, and it is a shame that we lose a lot of symbolic manipulation in the process. So, I still largely think it is getting people past their experiences. I think that is ultimately compatible with your point. I think I'm just calling into question how rosy the rest of the landscape isn't, in the learning environment.
- burnished 3y agoI think the .999 repeating thing has more to do with how we teach limits, people struggle to understand how two things that look definitionally different are the same because the rationale isn't well motivated. I had a professor that framed the whole process as an argument which was much easier to grasp, and I can easily imagine most people just getting a lecture or two on the equations and the implications. Plus phrasing it as 'equals' or 'are the same' sort of puts the challenging part right in the front. Focusing on the difference more naturally leads you to the same conclusion.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]