Being mathematically gifted is quite different from having a "statistical" worldview. I've known people far more gifted at math than me say, what I consider to be, stupid things like, "Women are just as good at math as men, because I knew this one lady at work..."
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I want to strangle those people who cannot grasp overlapping bell curves, or per capita, or say 'I should of done it'. You're right about this blind spot-- I call it 'gestalt awareness' but 'statistical worldview' works as well.
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And they keep repeating it. I have had so many unsuccessful conversations with them and their anecdotes.

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I recognize that emoji-face... same one I make in these situations.
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I wonder if ancient tax farmers used much math or proto-stats when figuring how much to bid to win a contract?
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Obviously they didn't care about the datasets because they didn't have pandas or R before the 1800s, duh
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No need for statistics when there aren't any rules against noticing
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Empirical validation of statistical methods probably wasn’t so easy before modernity. Collecting the first data set isn’t the problem. It’s collecting the 2nd, or the nth, and comparing them to notice stable, replicable trends within.
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I think censuses tended to be periodic. Every strong state did them to help with tax collection.
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Indian and Greek mathematicians and astronomers figured out a bunch of things so it's surprising they didn't stumble onto f=ma. they lacked algebra, sure, but had an uncanny way of verbalizing the same. too practical; didn't care?
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I mean the guy who invented 0 could also predict eclipses to a precision that shocked euro travelers some 1300 years later, and after newton. dont think it ever occurred to him that someone would want to trace the patterns of non-celestial motion.
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Before the industrial rev., extended reach of capitalism, etc, there wasn't much need for it. And there were plenty of rule-of-thumb heuristics available, free of PC nonsense. Avg. farmer/rancher in 1700 prob. understood heredity/race/sex better than avg. New Yorker today.
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Have you ever *tried* to do advanced calculations without the Hindu-Arabic number system?
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It’s also surprising to me how late the development of probability theory was, given how long we’ve had games of chance and how obsessed people are with them.
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"(As a patient in a 1997 statistical study of the first successful monoclonal antibody for fighting cancer, rituximab, I would demur that statistics really matter..." The "n of the one that really matters" principle.
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We're better intuitive physicists (so calculus came first) than we are statisticians. Stats isn't intuitive
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One could argue that people invent the mathematics when they need it. In the 18th century, the life insurance business took off after the math needed for it was invented.
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Big notation problems in past. MLVII divided by LXXX times itself? Try doing that without even thinking of modern notation.
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About 30 years after Darwin published. Correlation or causation?
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