People who have some understanding of study design and data collection would be in a much better spot to understand and interpret day-to-day news / “information flood” than those who have done a lot of calculus-based probability. You can go all the way through rigorous measure-theoretical probability and come away with almost nothing useful for interpreting a study.
Most problems I see with moderns statistics aren’t of the form “ohhh, they fooled you by using a subtly wrong statistical metric to ascribe significance” but “the way the data was gathered/interpreted is fundamentally wrong and made to mislead”
Some of the problems come from statistics itself. “All models are wrong, but some are damn hard to interpret.” Let’s make that a corollary to Box’s statement about the utility of models. Why does so much statistical analysis take place without even an expectation of human comprehension? It’s just magical sigils for most papers.
Many midlevel statistical practitioners suffer from a holier than thou complex, where a “correct” approach to statistical analysis might buy a little more precision at the expense of a lot of comprehension.
Box plots or Bar charts with error bars, using randomized data collection. That’s like 90% of the interpretive value right there. Statistics is a UI for math and it could use improvement if we expect so much from it.
See Brett Victor’s “Kill Math” for more context on why we should expect more from our mathematical interfaces.
http://worrydream.com/KillMath/
> "Math" consists of assigning meaning to a set of symbols, blindly shuffling around these symbols according to arcane rules, and then interpreting a meaning from the shuffled result. The process is not unlike casting lots.
@dr_dshiv Edit: Sorry about the bad quote, I should have included the prefix "When most people speak of Math ...". And the negative comment about the blog post.
Now I've read / skimmed all of it and it was interesting, I hope the new methods he wants to use for teaching maths will work fine. (I'm sceptical, but still seems like worth to give it a try.)
I think his project title does his project a disservice: "Kill maths"? That sounds silly to me.
And how it starts -- I got annoyed and stopped reading (until I went back two days later).
Another more positive project title maybe could be "Maths for everyone" or "A new approach for teaching maths"?
Most problems I see with moderns statistics aren’t of the form “ohhh, they fooled you by using a subtly wrong statistical metric to ascribe significance” but “the way the data was gathered/interpreted is fundamentally wrong and made to mislead”