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Comment by apathy | Hacker News Reader

Reminder: the terms "statistics" and "statisticians" come from the common root word "statist".

I am a trained, practicing statistician (clinical and medical, not governmental) and this always gives me pause. "Data science" is a shitty term, because science without data isn't science at all. Moreover, these days it's just long for "IT guy". But I'm not sure what's better as a term for the real thing, where experimental design and inference are as important as predictive accuracy in one specific context.

Anyways. Statistics was always built around statism.

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This is kind of a nonsequitur. The etymology of a word does (obviously) not imply anything about the social impact that the use of statistics has and is just a clever anecdote. I haven't seen any marxist criticism of statistics itself, which is telling considering marxism is a ruthless critique of everything. Obviously a state or corporation can use any tool (science, technology, writing, math) for its own gain or detriment, and that fact speaks nothing to the general social utility of that tool- it also doesn't speak to whether or not specific uses of that tool by a state or corporation are legitimate or self-serving.

Also, "Data Science" doesn't refer to Science with Data, but the study of data analysis itself, and for that purpose is a reasonable albeit often unnecessary term.

I'm not sure I get your point, care to elaborate?

He's wrong, that's not correct. In fact it comes from "state", statism is a term referring to the actions of a highly centralised government who handle economic planning and controls.

"Statism" is a term that has been around since the 1850s, but "statistics" is a term coined by Gottfried Aschenwall in the late 1770s.

Well, I didn't claim to be a trained historian, which is probably the correct training for this type of work. Based on your temporal evidence, I must concede the point.

However, I did not actually pull this straight out of my ass: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/statist

Thanks for the history lesson (seriously). I learned from it.

stat·ism ˈstādˌizəm/ noun noun: statism

    a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs.
    "the rise of authoritarian statism"

Were Einstein's thought experments not science? There was no data.

Usually that gets filed under theory or philosophy.

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