[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
example demonstrate my points. In the first, the clear question is how
exactly will you objectively and unbiasedly  measure your health. Note that
your day to day subjective ratings or whatever are subject to a host of
outside influences that you will need to randomize against or somehow
include as covvariates. You will also need to decide exactly how to make
whatever changes you want to make. These are all issues of experimental
design, about which you were taught nothing I expect. Anything you come up
with on the basis of your stats 101 course are likely to be pretty
worthless. Except as a placebo, of course(which actually can be effective).
As for your AC example, clearly how much electricity you use depends on
temperature, humidity, how much you were around, etc. Without this info
over several years before and after the change, there is no way that you
can make a meaningful comparison. In other words, you don't have the data
to answer the question.

Bert

On Tue, May 6, 2025, 21:58 Bert Gunter <bgunter.4567 using gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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