9 ms·
The t-test was invented at the Guinness brewery
- mcmoor 2y agoThis Guiness connection is the core of the jokes when explaining about t-test in Larry Gonick's History of Statistics.
- mmastrac 2y agoInteresting read. I don't think this came up in my stats classes: > Gosset solved many problems at the brewery with his new technique. The self-taught statistician published his t-test under the pseudonym “Student” because Guinness didn’t want to tip off competitors to its research. Although Gosset pioneered industrial quality control and contributed loads of other ideas to quantitative research, most textbooks still call his great achievement the “Student’s t-test.”
- jbjbjbjb 2y agoI always thought that name was strange but I never thought to look it up. Stats books are so dry, they don’t have the inclination to share these kinds of stories.
- TillE 2y agoThe history of just about anything is very interesting, but it's generally not relevant in a textbook which has a specific purpose.
- mp05 2y agoI agree with the sentiment, but I always have wondered what t-test a real engineer uses and why they only teach the "Student" version. Given the context, a bit of a clarifier would have been appreciated.
- alpple 2y agoI wonder if dry reading means written without the influence of drink. I couldn't find an answer online. But, if so, it would be ironic to describe a stat book that ignored a brewer as dry.
- ayhanfuat 2y agoYou probably missed it. This is something stat book authors love to mention. I don’t remember a stat intro book that doesn’t have a footnote for “Student t”.
- BeetleB 2y agoJust went through mine a few months ago. It definitely doesn't have it.
- whimsicalism 2y agowhat book? i'm honestly curious because of how frequently this story is repeated in stats textbooks
- BeetleB 2y agoThe author is Jay Devore.
- nxobject 2y agoWait until you hear about the bad blood between Fisher and Pearson.
- jldugger 2y ago> Stats books are so dry, they don’t have the inclination to share these kinds of stories. It doesn't have to be that way. My pandemic lockdown read was a 10 dollar Stats textbook[1], that comes with tons of classic examples: the Salk polio vaccine, a prosecutor misusing the multiplication rule using purely circumstantial evidence ("what are the odds that police pulled over the wrong couple matching 10 different pieces of description by the victim?"), the classic Gallup poll showing FDR would defeat Landon (versus incumbent _Literary Digest_ showing a Landon win), Gosset's history with Guiness, the early history of probability as gambling strategy, a controversy over Mendel's data on pea plant heredity being _too_ clean, and so on. Sadly, while this book left me well prepared to apply statistical reasoning in my day job, it's departure from typical pedagogy left me feeling unprepared for further reading based on perusal of Stats Wikipedia -- what's a kernel? what's a moment? etc. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Fourth-David-Freedman-ebook/dp/B00SLB5Q72 https://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Fourth-David-Freedman-eboo...
- madcaptenor 2y agoIn a former life I taught some intro stat courses from this book. It’s a good book for an intro course for people who aren’t going on to further stat classes, although I think for a current class I’d want something that acknowledges how statistics and computers have gotten all tied up with each other. (I don’t have any recommendations - it’s not my job to know this any more.)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- whimsicalism 2y agosorry but this is a classic story mentioned in almost every basic stats textbook i’ve read
- roenxi 2y agoDoubly unfortunate because the philosophical aspects of statistics are more important to students than most of maths. There are something like 4 different schools of thought [0] and people will have a natural propensity to one of them. Although they all agree on the formulas and rigorous aspects, it is actually a challenging proposition to comprehend what someone is doing if you strongly see the world from one perspective and don't realise that academics are potentially approaching the interpretation in one of 3 other ways. It adds a lot of dryness to the textbook because the author can really only talk about the objective parts in an introductory classroom setting. But if you're getting taught by a frequentist and have a subjectivity bent it is easy to spend a year or two confused before someone clues you in that there are unresolved questions of interpretation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_probability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_probability
- enasterosophes 2y ago> people will have a natural propensity to one of them. I see what you did there
- riffraff 2y agoInteresting, my university book of the subject was pretty tiny but it did talk of the different interpretations, but it only mentioned frequentist and bayesian. I did not suspect the story was much more complicated.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- orhmeh09 2y agoI liked this one a lot Abelson, R. P. (1995). Statistics as Principled Argument. Psychology Press. https://www.routledge.com/Statistics-As-Principled-Argument/Abelson/p/book/9780805805284 https://www.routledge.com/Statistics-As-Principled-Argument/... > In this illuminating volume, Robert P. Abelson delves into the too-often dismissed problems of interpreting quantitative data and then presenting them in the context of a coherent story about one's research. Unlike too many books on statistics, this is a remarkably engaging read, filled with fascinating real-life (and real-research) examples rather than with recipes for analysis. It will be of true interest and lasting value to beginning graduate students and seasoned researchers alike. The focus of the book is that the purpose of statistics is to organize a useful argument from quantitative evidence, using a form of principled rhetoric. Five criteria, described by the acronym MAGIC (magnitude, articulation, generality, interestingness, and credibility) are proposed as crucial features of a persuasive, principled argument. Particular statistical methods are discussed, with minimum use of formulas and heavy data sets. The ideas throughout the book revolve around elementary probability theory, t tests, and simple issues of research design. It is therefore assumed that the reader has already had some access to elementary statistics. Many examples are included to explain the connection of statistics to substantive claims about real phenomena.
- mindcrime 2y agoAt least they let him publish, albeit under a pseudonym. It makes me wonder how many potentially useful discoveries were made in industrial settings, and wound up being buried due to management not wanting to risk leaking competitive information. The good news, I suppose, would be if you believe that it's rarely the case that only one person could ever discover something. Then you can conclude that all (most?) such discoveries were eventually (or will eventually be) rediscovered independently. On a related note... I wonder how much valuable research disappears (more or less) when companies fold, get acquired, etc. Take MCC[1] for example. I've been doing a lot of reading lately that involves old papers from the 1990's on "agents" and "multi-agent systems". And time and time again, in the references, you'll see something like "MCC Technical Report TR86-32791" or some-such. Occasionally said report can be found online, but quite a few of them seem to be either hard - or impossible - to find. Maybe there's an archive of physical papers stored away somewhere, but FSM knows where the heck such a thing would be, or how hard it would be to get access. A similar situation came up a while back when we started discussing "sharding" here on HN[2]. There was a lot of effort spent trying to identify when the term first arose, and a lot of evidence pointed to a particular paper that was internal to CCA, who were acquired by Xerox. And now that original paper seems to be unobtanium. The paper probably still exists somewhere in the bowels of Xerox, but good luck ever getting your hands on it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectronics_and_Computer_Technology_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectronics_and_Computer_... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36848605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36848605
- schneems 2y ago> It makes me wonder how many potentially useful discoveries were made in industrial settings, and wound up being buried due to management not wanting to risk Probably a lot. I’ve come to find out that some dinosaur companies won’t even let their programmers open up issues on open source repos (forget sending patches or releasing their own software). The logic goes like this: if someone found the log4j zero day before it was reported they could comb through all issues and see the companies that the users worked for then try to target them. In this case any comment would indicate possible involvement. The least bit of security, through the tiniest extra bit of obscurity. Thankfully many of these companies are starting to come around and realizing that a lack of involvement with open source is more risky than accidental 3rd hand information leaking (like what dependencies doesn’t certain company use).
- CrazyStat 2y agoThis is such a great story, it should be included in every intro stats class (I did, back when I taught intro stats). Gosset didn’t have the mathematical background to derive the correct distribution theoretically, so he figured out what it was by simulating drawing samples of different sizes thousands of times and fitting curves. Simulating, in those days, meant writing numbers on thousands of cards, then shuffling and drawing a sample. Calculate the mean and standard deviation. Repeat. Thousands of times. He published the result with an apologetic shrug for not being able to prove it properly.
- richrichie 2y agoalong with compulsory Guinness tasting :)
- ForOldHack 2y agoUm. Wow. That's quite a story. But, it's not real. "owever, Guinness had a policy of not publishing company data, and allowed Gosset to publish his observations on the strict understanding that he did so anonymously." I'm 1906, Gosset was the guest of Person at UCL, and since Gosset had a First in Math, and Professor Pearson was the leading mathematician and publisher of the Bell curve.. Gosset spent a year at UCL. University College London. A year with an expert looking over his shoulder? I would think that he would publish with an extreme amount of confidence, forgoing the need for an apolocetic shrug, which I have never ever heard of. Never, and I have a degree in math with a minor in Statistics. They had playing cards. You are arguing for large sample sizes, which is not economical - precisely against the design of the test - which looks surprisingly suspicious.
- zinekeller 2y ago> But, it's not real. "owever, Guinness had a policy of not publishing company data, and allowed Gosset to publish his observations on the strict understanding that he did so anonymously." Except that this part is true. Obviously, he is well-known in academic circles, but Guinness did have a policy against its employees to publish their research using a pseudonym[1]. [1] Specifically, they can publish with three conditions: 1) To not mention Guinness or its competitors, 2) To not mention anything about beer (so topics specifically about beer is forbidden), and 3) To not publish using their surname (which in practical effect is to publish using a pseudonym).
- petesoper 2y ago54 years after I was mystified trying to parse the use of "student" for this, here is the answer. Cool!
- squirrel6 2y agoThis was in my textbook and my professor covered it as well! Class of 17 here
- wodenokoto 2y agoI always found "student" confusing in the name. Like, is there a "professors t-test" or something? I personally found a lot of peace after learning that tidbit.
- jll29 2y agoMany international conferences are regularly held in Dublin, and attendees often visit the Guinness brewery as part of conferences' social events, where a memorial plaque reminds them of Gosset and his important contributions to statistics.
- schneems 2y agoI did a talk in 2019 where I mention that tidbit. Of course, to properly do it justice I had to bring a Guinness and open it on stage. Here’s a video from EuRuKo that was filmed on a decommissioned ocean liner converted into a hotel and conf space https://youtu.be/Aczy01drwkg?si=lsVWAFv9f3eLc2fZ&t=1095 https://youtu.be/Aczy01drwkg?si=lsVWAFv9f3eLc2fZ&t=1095
- apsurd 2y agodamn, unfortunate the rabbit makes this unwatchable. otherwise, i love beer and great story, i'll just read about it.
- schneems 2y agoI agree. You can read the talk here https://www.schneems.com/2020/09/16/the-lifechanging-magic-of-tidying-ruby-object-allocations/ https://www.schneems.com/2020/09/16/the-lifechanging-magic-o.... I introduced the voiceover artist at the beginning, she’s a Japanese speaker that I found on fiver. I chose her because the talk was being given at a Japanese speaking conference (Ruby Kaigi). I love the foil of having a second character on screen but having an accented cartoon was not the right effect I was going for. I’m still experimenting with multiple characters in my talks but my most recent one I did doesn’t use any actors and I read their lines like a narrator. I think the effect works much better https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-8UQMH6p-Mw&list=PL9oQ7yETvN12aRSuBWqjrCjwtKugdAPrT&index=3&pp=iAQB https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-8UQMH6p-Mw&list=PL9oQ7yETvN12...
- apsurd 2y agoah, appreciate the reply, and the spirit of creativity. Kinda feel like I got caught being overly critical and here is the actual creator! Thanks for receiving it well and also for putting your stuff out there.
- schneems 2y agoI’m kinda glad you said something to be honest. I wanted to mention the voiceover being cringe but it’s also hard to pre-apologize for something without raising a lot of alarm bells. I’m still proud of the overall talk. I’m glad I pushed a limit, found it, and learned from it. Your comment stated what you saw and how you felt about it. I think you did a great job speaking up without lashing out or talking down. I appreciate that.
- tombert 2y agoThis doesn't surprise me; any industry involved with basically any manufacturing seems like a perfect testing ground for statistical methods. There's enough scale in these things where subtle differences can save tons of money, so it can be beneficial pretty quickly. I always thought the t-test was clever just because of how simple it was compared to more advanced stuff.
- firesteelrain 2y agoWe covered this in my Research Methods class as part of my Systems Engineering Masters. Growing and agriculture in the early 1900s benefitted from things like ANOVA, blocking factors, nuisance factors, factors, levels, ranges and experiment design such as full factorial design. It is taken for granted these days. F statistic, F crit, etc
- OisinMoran 2y agoGuinness was way ahead of their time and in many ways the Google of their day (building accomodation, high pay, great perks). My granddad worked there so all my dad's brother and sisters learned to swim in the Guinness swimming pool! Funnest tidbit is that the widget to get a good head from cans won the best invention of the year, the year the internet wax invented. For an excellent piece on many more interesting bits about Guinness, check this out: https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/no-great-stagnation-in-guinness https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/no-great-stagnation-in-guin...
- mcphage 2y agoI don’t think I’ll ever be interested in Internet Wax.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoAre you saying it's too challenging to polish a turd? not my downvote btw
- rob74 2y agoIt also apparently pioneered the practice of companies getting tax (or in their case, lease) concessions for "investing in Ireland"...
- wodenokoto 2y agoSince you called them the google of the day, it’s only fitting to mention that Guinness in “The Guinness book of record” refers to the brewery. And much like how we use Google to settle discussion in pubs today, the book was published to do that very same thing, back then.
- eleveriven 2y ago"The Guinness Book of Records" is a fascinating aspect of their history
- chillingeffect 2y agoWow, forcing visitors to individually disable 6 types of cookies. :thumbsdown.tif:
- jhbadger 2y agoI love these sorts of of things. I was fortunate enough to have this fact mentioned in my stats book in undergrad, and later when I was in Dublin and touring the Guinness brewery, they had a small exhibit on Gosset (although Gossett was actually based out of their brewery in England). Another fun fact that I learned in organic chemistry was that Alexander Borodin (the Russian composer who composed "In the Steppes of Central Asia" and "Prince Igor") was only a composer in his spare time and was actually professionally an organic chemist who was the co-discoverer of the aldol reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Borodin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Borodin
- gwern 2y agoI feel like OP unfortunately mostly misses the point of Gosset's work and the t-test, in the usual way of people taught the contemporary bastardization of Gosset/Fisher/Pearson/Neyman as NHST. The important thing isn't that it lets you calculate some _p_-value; the important thing is that it is a framework for decision-making, where you can trade off your false-positive and your false-negative rates to make the economically rational decision: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2018.1514325 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2018.1... In this case, because it is a well-understood problem with the rates of bad batches easily established from the brewery's records of testing & drinking, it lets the brewery decide on how many 'off' batches it wants to risk in exchange for saving the cost of a certain number of test-samples. You decide you want to risk 1 bad batch in 100 for a false negative while rejecting 1 good batch in 20, then you need _n_ samples etc. And this directly translates better measurements (by lowering variance, eg. by blocking) into money: the lower the variance, the fewer samples you need to achieve any given tradeoff, thereby saving the brewery money on scrapped material or testing. The smaller the better, hence Student's inability to use asymptotics or approximations: they might be off by orders of magnitude. (He would even try to do _n_ = 2 tests!) Or they might be trying to tightly optimize alcohol content, to avoid taxation for passing high-alcohol content thresholds, but also avoid going too low to disappoint their customers, so Student would explicitly calculate out scenarios, for example: > Thus, Gosset concluded, “In order to get the accuracy we require [that is, 10 to 1 odds with 0.5 accuracy], we must, therefore, take the mean of [at least] four determinations.” The Guinness Board cheered. The Apprentice Brewer found an economical way to assess the behavior of population parameters, using very small samples. (If you're thinking this sounds like a very subjective-Bayesian decision-theory thing to write, you are right, although Student would have rejected that, like most statisticians, and emphasized that he was dealing with populations with known base rates, and so nothing Bayesian was necessary; it was just a frequentist decision-theory approach.)
- nextos 2y agoThat article you posted is excellent, thank you. Also relevant: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.1982.10477809 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.1982.10...
- killjoywashere 2y agoAnother fun bit of biochemical history: Chaim Weizmann (1) was a biochemist and staunch Zionist who gained the attention of First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, for cultivating a bacterium, Clostridium acetobutylicum, that could produce acetone, which was in short supply and required for the production of cordite, the key propellent in naval artillery during World War I. In gratitude for Weizmann's contribution to the war effort, George Lloyd asked him what Britain could do for him, to which he replied "not for me, but for my people", which begat the Balfour Declaration (2) establishing Britain's commitment to provide a Home for the Jewish People (3). (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration (3) It is essentially lost to history that the Balfour Declaration also provided that the Palestinian people should not be displaced. It is also mostly lost to history that there was a great deal of politicking between Weizmann arriving in England and his audience with George Lloyd, including a world tour Weizmann orchestrated to promote one Albert Einstein.
- zabzonk 2y ago[flagged]
- colechristensen 2y agoReally the ultimate cause for all of that pain and suffering is the failure of the Ottoman Empire which was quite cosmopolitan while it lasted. There is plenty to criticize about the actions taken by many parties post-collapse, but I strongly doubt it's at all possible for external powers to take a failed empire and keep all the pieces happy in the aftermath. Those people have to do most of that themselves, and in this case they didn't for many reasons. Europe was ready for the transition away from monarchy and empire, the middle east wasn't. Russia/USSR tried a path that worked but not particularly well. Luck and circumstance also played a part. A century of war and strife post empire collapse isn't exactly unusual.
- ithkuil 2y ago
- mcdonje 2y agoThis story appears in "How to Measure Anything" by Douglas Hubbard, which is worth a read if you're not already a stats and decision theory whiz.
- colmmacc 2y agoMy first year of working at AWS was in the "DUB1" site, which was part of the Digital Hub (a tech and incubator space). As it happened ... Amazon's small office was in William Sealy Gosset's old laboratory, right beside St. Patrick's Tower where the Guinness cooperage was. As a former statistics lecturer, I excitedly told everyone I worked with how lucky we were, to almost no reaction! Can you imagine? A long time ago I submitted William Sealy Gosset as a suggestion for commemoration with an Irish Postage Stamp; but nothing has ever come of it. I hope some day he gets more recogonition.
- iamcreasy 2y ago> Gosset recognized that this approach only worked with large sample sizes, whereas small samples of hops wouldn’t guarantee that normal distribution. So he meticulously tabulated new distributions for smaller sample sizes. Does it mean Gosset stop before the distribution converging to normal distribution?
- VagabundoP 2y agoI went to school beside the Guinness brewery. The smell of the hops brewing will remain with me forever. However the school was dirt poor in many ways and they wouldn't sponsor our school football team to buy some kit. This was back in the 80's Ireland with massive unemployment and huge emigration. Ironically the school had a computer lab way beyond its time when one ex-pupil donated a couple of Apple Macs and a dozen Apple IIe's. That's were I cut my teeth on some - probably BASIC - programming, learning myself. On Topic - Guinness were always canny and ahead of their time. Getting a job there was like winning the lotto, you were pretty much made for life.
- eleveriven 2y agoCool. So for you the smell of hops brewing might bring a sense of nostalgia connected to school.
- paperhatwriter 2y agoComparing Guinness to an ‘earthy milkshake’ is one of the worst things I’ve ever read.
- hoseja 2y agoArtificially pumping beer full of nitrogen is kinda weird you gotta admit.
- mrob 2y agoThe nitrogen is just a propellant for forcing the beer through tiny holes that make the dissolved CO2 come out of solution in tiny bubbles, which form a more stable foam. Very little nitrogen actually dissolves into the beer.
- aitchnyu 2y agoLouis Pasteur developed his technique for wine and beer, and milk would benefit years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization
- westurner 2y agoThe students' t distribution has a symmetric PDF (with no skew), and thus you assume that the sample and/or population also have such a PDF (Probability Distribution Function). t statistic > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-statistic#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-statistic#History Students' t distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-distribution "What are some alternatives to sample mean and t-test when comparing highly skewed distributions" https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-alternatives-to-sample-mean-and-t-test-when-comparing-highly-skewed-distributions https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-alternatives-to-sample-m... : >> the Kolmogorov-Smirnov two-sample test, which essentially compares the empirical distribution functions of the two samples without implicitly assuming normality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov–Smirnov_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov–Smirnov_test > You may also be interested in the Wald-Wolfowitz runs test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wald–Wolfowitz_runs_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wald–Wolfowitz_runs_test ) and the Mann-Whitney test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann–Whitney_U http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann–Whitney_U ). Statistical Significance > Limitations, Challenges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance#Limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance#Limit... Statistical hypothesis test > Criticism, Alternatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_hypothesis_test#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_hypothesis_test#Cr... There are Multivariate Students' t distributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_t-distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_t-distribution Matrix t distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_t-distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_t-distribution : > The generalized matrix t-distribution is the compound distribution that results from an infinite mixture of a matrix normal distribution with an inverse multivariate gamma distribution placed over either of its covariance matrices. But does a matrix t-distribution describe nonlinear variance in complex wave functions? Quantum statistical mechanics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_statistical_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_statistical_mechanics : > In quantum mechanics a statistical ensemble (probability distribution over possible quantum states) is described by a density operator S, which is a non-negative, self-adjoint, trace-class operator of trace 1 on the Hilbert space H describing the quantum system. A Q12 question: How frequently are quantum density operators described by a parametric t distribution?
- the-mitr 2y agoI read this story and several other very interesting ones in this great book detailing the history of evolution of modern statistics -- The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg. The author himself personally met with several leading figures that he describes. Highly recommended!
- crispyambulance 2y agoSometimes I wonder about the actual utility of the T-test compared to just looking at a pair of boxplots, with jittered points (or some other indication of the number of data points). If it isn't plainly evident from the boxplots (assuming you've got "enough points") do T-tests alone ever make a truly compelling argument?
- tmoravec 2y agoThat would not be exactly scientific. T-test can be calculated independently and verified.
- _dain_ 2y agoBut you still need to choose a significance threshold, which is just an opinion. There's nothing "scientific" about p=0.05; surely God loves p=0.06 almost as much.
- crispyambulance 2y agoWhat I mean is, if the plots don't clearly make the case, I would not trust p-values alone.
- rstuart4133 2y agoThe article left me wondering: how long after Guinness invented the t-test did the hop growers invent p-hacking?