Blew. Blue bloom is on the. Gold pinnacled hair.
Statistics is what people think math is. Statistics is about patterns and that’s what people think math is about. The difference is that in math, you have to get very complicated before you get to interesting patterns. The math that we can all easily do – things like circles and triangles and squares – doesn’t really describe reality that much. Mandelbrot, when he wrote about fractals and talked about the general idea of self-similar processes, made it clear that if you want to describe nature, or social reality, you need very complicated mathematical constructions. The math that we can all understand from high school is just not going to be enough to capture the interesting features of real world patterns. Statistics, however, can capture a lot more patterns at a less technical level, because statistics, unlike mathematics, is all about uncertainty and variation. (…)
Bill James once said that you can lie in statistics just like you can lie in English or French or any other language. Sure, the more powerful a language is the more ways you can lie using it. There are a bunch of great quotes about statistics. There’s another one, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know.’
photo { Flemming Ove Bech }
