>>12853950>You should check out Nassim Nicholas Taleb.lmao I was wondering where you were going with the fat-tails black-swan rhetoric
>>12858261I do stats for a living, I can tell you that its the blind leading the blind. Stats departments do their own thing, and people teaching stats in other areas (psych, bio) are people who are poor at stats and just teaching the rote-memorization they learned. It's really bad. Worse is when they try to shoe-horn in R into the curriculum, so students can get doubly-confused by poor-quality coding instructions along with poor-quality stats
>>12853954black swan is his most famous; start there.
Taleb, however, is an angry little pleb. He reminds me of how Guns, Germs, and Steel become a de-facto "how the world got to where it was" when academics shows it clearly is not true, but its a nice digestible truth for the masses, so they swallowed it hole, even if it is a completely false narrative.
Taleb had that affect on statistics. Naive people who know some but not enough stats reads his book and become a disciple of the ideas, while being embarrassingly uninformed of statistics. His book had some great ideas and impact, but he's not in the business of statistics and understanding, he's in the business of selling books.
He's a financial advisor and although he proposed that he follows the truth, he conveniently hand-waves away and stumbles over questions pertaining to "why do financial firms do as good as coin flips, statistically?", because his ego wont admit to himself that for all the sound and fury of the firm; statistically, you can do just as well by coin-flipping to make your decisions.
