On 6/03/2009, at 10:38 AM, Mark Difford wrote:
Hi Rolf,
... From the beginner's point of view it is useful to think of
random
variables ...
Who, exactly, is the beginner ?
The OP --- well, not the OP, but the person who introduced this
line of discussion to this thread, by saying that sports scores
were not/could not be statistics --- seemed to be pretty much at
the neophyte level.
More generally there seem to be lots of subscribers to this list
who not sophisticated mathematical statisticians and would benefit
more from the ``random quantity that you are going to observe'' pov
than from the ``measurable function on a probability space'' pov.
And was not Sir R. A. Fisher pretty arrogant
and fractious ?
Dunno. Never met him! :-)
He also was highly dismissive of Sir Richard Doll's
conclusion that smoking caused cancer (himself being a smoker).
Does that
make him a bad statistician,
I don't ***think*** so.
or all statisticians "bad" or arrogant ?
I can think of at least one counter-example, that being of course
my very good self! :-)
What is your point, exactly?
I asserted that in my experience physicists tend to be arrogant
(and dismissive and condescending) in respect of statistics.
That *is* my experience. I haven't done a carefully designed
survey, but.
Many (most?) statisticians have a similar impression of the
attitudes of
pure mathematicians. That is *not* my experience.
I certainly never said that no statisticians are arrogant; some
of them may well be. I never met one, but. :-)
cheers,
Rolf Turner
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