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Most statistics classes are not taught to people who will be professional statisticians. I agree whole-heartedly with this: > The book by Freedman, Pisani, and

Most statistics classes are not taught to people who will be professional statisticians. I agree whole-heartedly with this: > The book by Freedman, Pisani, and Purves is the one I would have liked to teach from, and it was the book I drew upon the most in prepping my own lectures, as an antidote to the overwrought and confused style of my assigned text. The authors maintain the underlying attitude that statistics is a useful tool for understanding certain questions about the world, but in this way it augments human judgement, rather than supplanting it. To quote from the preface: > > Why does the book include so many exercises that cannot be solved by plugging into a formula? The reason is that few real-life statistical problems can be solved that way. Blindly plugging into statistical formulas has caused a lot of confusion. So this book takes a different approach: thinking.

lupire 2y ago
Like calculus for the engineer, statistics is primarily for the social scientist. It is an applied mathenatics, or a form of physics (math in the realm world). Math fans tend to discount and dismiss applied statistics as being not math, in a way that they don't do for physics, for some reason I don't fully grasp. I think it's because statistics gets a bad reputation from the legions of terrible social scientists in the wild, who can easily publish false but socially interesting results that get applied to our real lives. Mathematically fraudulent physics, on the other hand, usually immediately dies in the engineering phase, leaving just a few rambling cranks that most of everyone ignores. Also (and related) perhaps, just as dry mathematical statistics ignores real world empirical experimentation, "wet" applied statistics goes to far into ignoring the math completely, because too few empirical scientists are able to understand the math when they would wncounter itm
- solveit 2y ago
  > Math fans tend to discount and dismiss applied statistics as being not math, in a way that they don't do for physics, for some reason I don't fully grasp. It's because we're secretly afraid that the physicists are smarter than us. Less facetiously, physicists keep discovering things that lead to new mathematics we would never have dreamed of ourselves, so we have a healthy respect for how insightful they can be.

lupire 2y ago

Like calculus for the engineer, statistics is primarily for the social scientist. It is an applied mathenatics, or a form of physics (math in the realm world). Math fans tend to discount and dismiss applied statistics as being not math, in a way that they don't do for physics, for some reason I don't fully grasp. I think it's because statistics gets a bad reputation from the legions of terrible social scientists in the wild, who can easily publish false but socially interesting results that get applied to our real lives. Mathematically fraudulent physics, on the other hand, usually immediately dies in the engineering phase, leaving just a few rambling cranks that most of everyone ignores. Also (and related) perhaps, just as dry mathematical statistics ignores real world empirical experimentation, "wet" applied statistics goes to far into ignoring the math completely, because too few empirical scientists are able to understand the math when they would wncounter itm

solveit 2y ago
> Math fans tend to discount and dismiss applied statistics as being not math, in a way that they don't do for physics, for some reason I don't fully grasp. It's because we're secretly afraid that the physicists are smarter than us. Less facetiously, physicists keep discovering things that lead to new mathematics we would never have dreamed of ourselves, so we have a healthy respect for how insightful they can be.