It never ceases to amaze me, that so many otherwise intelligent and educated people use statistical data to make claims about individual cases, involving non-linear things. This includes making claims about the nature of learning. Most of the responses already posted here are a case in point. Ironically, Jacob Bernoulli, in what many consider to…
What a complicated question! My two cents? Jacob Bernoulli’s, Ars Conjectandi (The Art of Conjecture), published in 1713, is the first book to be published on what has come to be called, statistics. And anytime science treats statistics as science, it is doing something Bernoulli warned against. Here, Bernoulli is the man who invented statistics…
Ah, Dennis, what a brilliant question. Thank you for asking me to respond. To begin with, I think it’s actually your second possibility that nails it: That statistics, as an idea, has never properly been understood. My evidence? Read the original book on statistics, Jacob Bernoulli’s 1713 book, Ars Conjectandi (The Art of Conjecturing). In…