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How I Learned To Love Statistics — And Why You Should, Too

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the is-a-love-of-statistics-a-normal-distribution? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Over on the npr blog 13.7 Cosmos and Culture , contributor Adam Frank has written a commentary on how he learned to love statistics.

What I loved about physics were its laws. They were timeless. They were eternal. Most of all, I believed they fully and exactly determined everything about the behavior of the cosmos.

Statistics, on the other hand, was about the imperfect world of imperfect equipment taking imperfect data. For me, that realm was just a crappy version of the pure domain of perfect laws I was interested in. Measurements, by their nature, would always be messy. A truck goes by and jiggles your equipment. The kid you paid to do the observations isn't really paying attention. The very need to account for those variations made me sad.

Now, however, I see things very differently. My change of heart can be expressed in just two words — Big Data. Over the last 10 years, I've been watching in awe as the information we have been inadvertently amassing has changed society for better and worse. There is so much power, promise and peril for everyone in this brave new world that I knew I had to get involved. That's where my new life in statistics began.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by riT-k0MA on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:29AM

    by riT-k0MA (88) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:29AM (#437606)

    "Don trust any statistics you haven forged yourself"

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  • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:43AM

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:43AM (#437608)

    Don Corleone? Which haven?

    [Don't trust any apostrophes you haven't typed yourself]

    • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:11AM

      by pTamok (3042) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:11AM (#437612)

      Were they stainless statistics they wouldn't rust no matter who had forged them.

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by gidds on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:15PM

        by gidds (589) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:15PM (#437702)

        Were they stainless statistics

        No, that's the problem — they were created with Big Iron!

        --
        [sig redacted]

  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:59AM

    by looorg (578) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:59AM (#437626)

    Other peoples statistics or data are the best and the worst at the same time. They are usually free to use but they never really show exactly what you want them to ...