Here are the most important parts of statistics: | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Statistics is associated with random numbers: normal distributions, probability distributions more generally, random sampling, randomized experimentation. But I don’t think these are the most important parts of statistics. I thought about this when rereading this post that I wrote awhile ago but happened to appear yesterday. Here’s the relevant bit: In his self-experimentation, Seth lived the contradiction between the two tenets of evidence-based medicine: (1) Try everything, measure everything, record everything; and (2) Make general recommendations based on statistical evidence rather than anecdotes. Seth’s ideas were extremely evidence-based in that they were based on data that he gathered himself or that people personally sent in to him, and he did use the statistical evidence of his self-measurements, but he did not put in much effort to reduce, control, or adjust for biases in his measurements, nor did he systematically gather data on multiple people. I think that these are the m

Statistics is associated with random numbers: normal distributions, probability distributions more generally, random sampling, randomized experimentation. But I don’t think these are the most important parts of statistics. I thought about this when rereading this post that I wrote awhile ago but happened to appear yesterday. Here’s the relevant bit: In his self-experimentation, Seth lived the contradiction between the two tenets of evidence-based medicine: (1) Try everything, measure everything, record everything; and (2) Make general recommendations based on statistical evidence rather than a