In the early years of scientific high school, even before the mythical 80's (why mythical, then?) My class experimented with a mathematics program that included fairly thorough notions of combinatorial calculus, probability calculus, statistics.
Even then I personally experienced how these mathematical theories are hard to digest and to use correctly and how difficult it is to realize, for these theories even more than for the rest of mathematics, that these are theoretical abstractions and not punctual representations of reality.
Over the years, pervasive use of this part of mathematics by people dealing with other things has taken hold: economists, political scientists, sociologists but above all in the medical and epidemiological fields.
Which is not bad, of course, were it not for the fact that the vast majority of those who today, in various disciplines, make extensive use of these theories and have not well understood them, do not understand, in general, the relationship that exists between a mathematical theory and phenomenal reality.
While in fact it is easier to understand that geometry is an abstraction, the presence of perfect spheres, of infinite planes, of parallel straight lines, in the real world is at least doubtful, commonly the part of the abstraction of mathematical instruments is skipped at the same footing. of the calculation of the probabilities or of statistics and it is thus thought to fall into objective reality as if nothing had happened.
What is the probability that, after rolling a dice a thousand times, always getting a 4 that goes out again at the next roll?
The total ignorant would say "I guess it comes out again 4", the sorcerer's apprentice who studied probability calculus, would say a sixth, thus proving once again that the common sense of the big-footed peasant always outclasses the graduate's baggage .
Mathematics is a theory that applies to an abstraction of the real world, it is not its representation, it serves to simplify what is too complicated to be fully understood and treated by our mind too simple.
Obviously that dice is NOT the dice of probability theory, which is an abstract dice constructed in such a way that the faces all have the same probability of appearing after a launch.
If we can infer something about the actual dice it is VERY PROBABLY there is not actually a dice that meets the equiprobability requirements of the probability theory, so if a dice, after n throws, shows a tendency to present a face more often than others, the probability that the next number comes out is higher than the other faces. Why? Because it is a real dice and not an abstract dice.
The queen of the abuse is the statistic, for the use of which, in my opinion, a sort of point license should be established, so that, first of all, not everyone can use it, causing damage and, once the license, are monitored so that after a certain number of infringements, minus the points, they are put in a position to do no more harm.
How Catholics use the method developed by Ogino "... to develop a formula for use in aiding infertile women to time intercourse to achieve pregnancy" instead of having children, not having an unwanted pregnancy, so today the most diverse researchers without Statistical patents use a suitable method to check whether an inference is NOT statistically significant to state that a certain cause-effect relationship is statistically relevant.
Coming so easily to ridicule, just as Catholics easily reach birth.
We are talking about one of the simplest uses of statistics, yet the vast majority of non-mathematical research using statistics uses it to prove that a cause-effect relationship is verified because it is statistically significant.
How it is possible not to understand that BEFORE must have very solid bases in reality that justify the inference of a cause-effect relationship and the statistic can only avoid a blunder by clarifying that this relationship is NOT statistically relevant but NOTHING can say about the fact that it is ?
One of the most recent delusions in the use of statistics is that linked to the very concept of mean and deviation from the average applied to the disease in general and, which is even worse, to education.
First of all, diseases of every kind have been invented, theorizing that the disease is any deviation from the average, showing that it does not understand anything about the concept of media, deviation, disease and statistics, of course.
Thus was born an incredible fight against cholesterol, against all kinds of food, and many others.
People who should not have the license for anything, for years, have introduced, what is worse with success, using statistics as a picklock, obviously without any understanding whatsoever, real mental cages in education.
Thus, out of nothing, diseases have been created for every type of deviation, even minimal, from the average learning capacity of any subject of teaching or intellectual or practical ability. Hyperactivity, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dis-whatever are the new diseases pointed out in those who dare to present a deviation from the average.
How can one be so dull as to not understand the very concept of media? How can it be defined as non-compliant, therefore ill, anyone who is not exactly average?
The mental process that underlies all these things is the most worrying phenomenon.
The steps are as follows.
I do not understand a certain theory but I want to use it, in particular I do not understand the relationship between an abstract theory and reality.
Since objectively applying an abstract theory to reality the theory does NOT work, then I try to modify reality so that it becomes abstract.
Here is the attempt to create children all the same, with the same degree of learning in every discipline, people all with the same value of cholesterol in the blood, and so on.
The damage produced by this approach is enormous and is real, not at all abstract.
When will a license be set up that protects us from the abuse of statistics?
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