I hate statistics
I may have mentioned it before, but statistics is the worst subject ever to be inflicted on a student. It's even worse than maths.
If you google the phrase, "I hate statistics", you'll come up with all sorts of blogs and other websites written by people that teach the subject. They'll go on about the fact that, most people that hate statistics do so because they aren't very good at maths, or aren't that interested in maths.
No, the reason most people hate statistics is because it's taught by people who have such a twisted personality they actually enjoy it. This twist also renders them incapable of realising that, those of us that hate statistics, are going to have great difficulty learning it if all the textbooks and study notes are written as though we all love it.
No matter how much people try to justify the reasons for people hating statistics, it's not going to change the fact that the majority of statistics and maths teachers are incapable of teaching.
Even the book "Statistics for the Utterly Confused" causes my eyes to glaze over as soon as I start to read it.
Now I realise that having an understanding of stats is necessary in science. Scientists gather and interpret data from their experiments. What I don't understand is why I can't just put the data into a program on my computer, tell it what I want to do with that data, then get easy to interpret results. No, I basically have to learn to be a computer programmer to get the software to analyse the data. If I do something wrong, I get a completely meaningless error message that is useless to me. What the hell does "NaNs produced" mean?
You're probably wondering why I'm ranting on about stats. I'm supposed to be working on an assignment and I'm stuck. This is the fourth one for this subject and there are two more after this one. This is the third time I've attempted the subject, the other two times I pulled out early enough to avoid failing. The lecturer this time is at least a lot better than the previous two, but that still doesn't make it any easier to learn. It's still a crap subject taught my someone who enjoys maths.
What I'd like to see in a stats class is the data on how many people fail statistics and what majors those people are doing.
Did I mention that I hate statistics?
4 comments:
What you have to understand about Ststistic is that 87.4% of them are made up; usually on the spur of the moment safe in the knowledge that no one is going to go and check the figures.
Amen brotha, I just googled the same phrase as I am trying to figure out for the 2nd hour how to do a residual analysis pon a quadratic relationship something. You speak the truth...
I literally have hated any subject this freaking much in my entire life. It's not even math - it's just data entry. I want to change my major because of this... it's not what I was expecting to do when I signed up to be a psychology major. I wanted to HELP people; instead I get to sit and crunch stupid numbers all day? WTF?
By the way, I'm working on a Ph.D. in Statistics (yes, I'm one of those weird people who actually love this stuff).
"What I don't understand is why I can't just put the data into a program on my computer, tell it what I want to do with that data, then get easy to interpret results."
For simple problems, you can do just that. Software packages like SAS, SPSS, R, and JMP have that ability. You just have to know what function to call and what parameters to feed it (or, in the case of JMP, you simply need to know what to click on). The problem is that statistics is not that simple. We can't easily classify every problem into some best-fitting class, and run some algorithm to give us a solution. There are even a large number of problems with no known solution, and you also have to consider what kind of optimality criteria you want to use. These problems are not entirely theoretical either. We're talking about real world data analysis.
So yeah, that situation would be ideal, but unfortunately, it's unrealistic.
"What the hell does "NaNs produced" mean?"
Lol. Even I still get those.
"No, the reason most people hate statistics is because it's taught by people who have such a twisted personality they actually enjoy it. This twist also renders them incapable of realising that, those of us that hate statistics, are going to have great difficulty learning it if all the textbooks and study notes are written as though we all love it."
I think the point is that teachers want to inspire love in the subject so that students will do better. Unfortunately, this is a futile task. I think the emphasis should move from "this is fun" to "this is easy". This is not to belittle students, but statistics is much easier than people think (at the 101 level - advanced stat is HARD), so they set themselves up for failure by thinking it is harder than it really is. I hear students all the time saying there is too much math and they are "bad at math". In STAT 101, you deal with numbers a lot, but you use very little math...nothing past Junior High pre-algebra. I think helping students get over this phobia would help a lot.
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