

Ask HN: What do you believe in? Calculus or Statistics - chirau

To quote Peter Thiel via &quot;The hard thing about hard things&quot; by Ben Horowitz:<p>&quot;There are several different frameworks one could use to get a handle on the indeterminate vs. determinate question. The math version is calculus vs. statistics. In a determinate world, calculus dominates. You can calculate specific things precisely and deterministically. When you send a rocket to the moon, you have to calculate precisely where it is at all times. It’s not like some iterative startup where you launch the rocket and figure things out step by step. Do you make it to the moon? To Jupiter? Do you just get lost in space? There were lots of companies in the ’90s that had launch parties but no landing parties.
But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.
With calculus, you can calculate things far into the future. You can even calculate planetary locations years or decades from now. But there are no specifics in probability and statistics—only distributions. In these domains, all you can know about the future is that you can’t know it. You cannot dominate the future; antitheories dominate instead. The Larry Summers line about the economy was something like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but anyone who says he knows what will happen doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Today, all prophets are false prophets. That can only be true if people take a statistical view of the future.&quot;<p>— Peter Thiel
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impendia
I believe that Peter Thiel doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. He
seems to have confused mathematics and new age philosophy.

"There are no specifics in probability and statistics"? I would call this
statement bullshit, but I cannot figure out any precise meaning to ascribe to
it.

"Antitheories dominate instead?" Umm..... huh?!

As a math educator, I find the question of whether to teach calculus or
statistics in high schools extremely interesting, relevant, and important. If
you want to ponder this question, I recommend beginning with a more
substantive contribution to the debate.

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memming
Using calculus to predict the future is a special case of statistics where
your uncertainty is zero. Statistics is absolutely necessary to do any science
or prediction. It provides how confident you are with your prediction, and
there's nothing special about having uncertainty in your beliefs (yes I am a
Bayesian).

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dubya
This is a false dichotomy. Calculus and measure theory underlie probability
theory which provides the foundation for most of statistics. Stochastic
calculus is another tool for dealing with noise in systems. Good luck
understanding stochastic calculus without regular calculus.

