Thank you to everyone who responded. I gained a lot of insight into statistical methods and the nature of statistical thinking. I replied to some people privately, to limit the traffic on this OT question.
And thank you for the patience of all who were annoyed by this off- topic question, and who didn't write to complain. I promise to limit off-topic questions in the future. -Kevin On Mon, 2025-05-05 at 15:17 +0000, Kevin Zembower wrote: > I marked this posting as Off Topic because it doesn’t specifically > apply to R and Statistics, but is rather a general question about > statistics and the teaching of statistics. If this is annoying to > you, > I apologize. > > As I wrap up my work in my beginning statistics course, I’d like to > ask > a philosophical question regarding statistics. > > In my course, we’ve learned two different ways to solve statistical > problems: simulations, using bootstraps and randomized distributions, > and theoretical methods, using Normal (z) and t-distributions. We’ve > learned that both systems solve all the questions we’ve asked of > them, > and that both give comparable answers. Out of six chapters that we’ve > studied in our textbook, the first four only used simulation methods. > Only the last two used theoretical methods. > > My questions are: > > 1) Why don’t professional statisticians settle on one or the other, > and > just apply that system to their problems and work? What advantage > does > one system have over the other? > > 2) As beginning statistics students, why is it important for us to > learn both systems? Do you think that beginning statistics students > will still be learning both systems in the future? > > Thank you very much for your time and effort in answering my > questions. > I really appreciate the thoughts of the members of this group. > > -Kevin > > > > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
