[R] OT: A philosophical question about statistics

[Bert Gunter]

I am out of the country and will reply more fully to you (privately) when I
return. But briefly, and subject to my possible
misunderstanding/misinterpretation of your specification, I would say both
your examples illustrate exactly what I said. In the first, the clea

On Tue, May 6, 2025, 14:23 Kevin Zembower via R-help <r-help using r-project.org>
wrote:

> Thank you to everyone who responded. I gained a lot of insight into
> statistical methods and the nature of statistical thinking. I replied
> to some people privately, to limit the traffic on this OT question.
>
> And thank you for the patience of all who were annoyed by this off-
> topic question, and who didn't write to complain. I promise to limit
> off-topic questions in the future.
>
> -Kevin
>
> On Mon, 2025-05-05 at 15:17 +0000, Kevin Zembower wrote:
> > I marked this posting as Off Topic because it doesn’t specifically
> > apply to R and Statistics, but is rather a general question about
> > statistics and the teaching of statistics. If this is annoying to
> > you,
> > I apologize.
> >
> > As I wrap up my work in my beginning statistics course, I’d like to
> > ask
> > a philosophical question regarding statistics.
> >
> > In my course, we’ve learned two different ways to solve statistical
> > problems: simulations, using bootstraps and randomized distributions,
> > and theoretical methods, using Normal (z) and t-distributions. We’ve
> > learned that both systems solve all the questions we’ve asked of
> > them,
> > and that both give comparable answers. Out of six chapters that we’ve
> > studied in our textbook, the first four only used simulation methods.
> > Only the last two used theoretical methods.
> >
> > My questions are:
> >
> > 1) Why don’t professional statisticians settle on one or the other,
> > and
> > just apply that system to their problems and work? What advantage
> > does
> > one system have over the other?
> >
> > 2) As beginning statistics students, why is it important for us to
> > learn both systems? Do you think that beginning statistics students
> > will still be learning both systems in the future?
> >
> > Thank you very much for your time and effort in answering my
> > questions.
> > I really appreciate the thoughts of the members of this group.
> >
> > -Kevin
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
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