WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT?!?!? T VALUES? P VALUES? OH WE JUST CHOOSE A RANDOM NUMBER WE LIKE TO BE THE THRESHOLD FOR NORMALCY? OH THATS SO COOL AND OBJECTIVE AND MATHMATICAL. SOUNDS LIKE BULLSHIT TO ME ACTUALLY. OH YOU WANT ME TO DO A XI^2 TEST? HOW ABOUT YOU XI^2 MY ASS! FUCKING MEASURE THE CRITICAL Z VALUE OF MY TAINT. LOSER.
I have the exact opposite opinion. Sure, math is pretty, but it also lies. It’s how you get “spherical cow in a vacuum” solutions to problems. Statistics is dirty, but that’s because everything it measures is even dirtier. Mathematics without statistics can only tell you what should be. Statistics is how you measure what actually is.
I hear you, but that feels like more of a physics model vs. engineering heuristic dichotomy rather than math vs. statistics.
(If you haven’t seen it already, the Engineer Guy did a lovely little series of videos about engineering heuristics)
The kind of math I find alluring doesn’t operate in an idealized version of reality; rather, it’s completely divorced from reality, instead living in universes defined solely by mathematical axioms. It’s only incidentally that real-world applications that arise from these investigations (e.g. modern cryptography from the work of centuries of number theory nerds). But to each their own! In general, I prefer the concrete to the abstract, but statistics is an exception.