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Comment by joatmon-snoo | Hacker News Reader

Education is a Hard Problem TM because the knowledge of those links isn't useful without sufficient existing knowledge, and you need to introduce things in a way such that the things you hand-wave away are tolerable knowledge gaps. Knowing that a CDF is an integrated PDF isn't useful for someone who doesn't even have a notion of what a PDF is. Describing a state machine that satisfies conditions X Y Z as an Abelian group is similarly not useful for someone who doesn't have an intuition for groups or fields.

My claim is that, given the finite amount of time allotted to mathematics in a secondary school curriculum, it's better to spend that time learning about medians/means, regressions, statistical tests, and so forth, instead of memorizing power laws and derivatives of trigonometric functions.

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What would someone other than a scientist use regressions for?

I've used one once. I wanted to make a volume control that I thought sounded subjectively even across the range and gave the right amount of control. So I used a polynomial regression calc on a random website and gave it some data points I wanted it to go through.

But that's not actually doing a regression, just knowing it exists and computers can do them.

Is there any math that has any use whatsoever unless you know a whole lot of it and plan to do some technical projects? I thought the whole point of learning any math(Even arithmetic, since phones exist now) is just so you can learn other more advanced math, and maybe someday be a solid state chemist or something.

Statistics lets you read a scientific paper, but you don't actually need to understand it, unless you're actually going to be reviewing their raw data. Most everyday people just trust the p values and move on to wondering about confounders they forgot.

Seems like you could cover all the statistics people will actually use it about 4 hours.

> Most everyday people just trust the p values and move on to wondering about confounders they forgot.

Perhaps because they never took statistics.

Basically every person who writes papers using statistics has taken a course in statistics. Medical doctors do it, psychologists do it etc. And the statistics course you'd replace calculus with would be even lower level than that, basically worthless to everyone. At least calculus trains you to think about rate of change and slopes, statistics gives you nothing practical. It isn't like people remember those formulas so they can apply them in their daily lives.

People don't need to remember and apply formulas. They just need an intuition that they could be applied and how that might change the appearance of the statistics, as a kind of gauge of reliability. A tool for rationalization.

Or because they aren't scientists and quite likely the original data is hidden for privacy reasons, and also they don't have that kind of free time.

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