Mastodawn

@bsmall2 That sound more like philosophy than maths :-)

@ghostdancer
Yes... That's been a surprising thing about trying to learn statistics: that there are philosophical disputes among "frequentists", "objective Bayesians", and "subjective Bayesians"... Lancelot Hogben's _Statistical Theory_ has some funny lines about the "social context" and outlook of some of the big names (Galton, Karl Pearson, Fisher, Quetelet..) in the field. As I look into some of his references I'm finding more philosophy...

@bsmall2 Thinking about it looks logical, as always we have prejudices or bias when we analyze something and how we value probabilities and the weight we assign to events.

@ghostdancer I'm still trying to wrap my head around it but even with coins and dice people have different ways of looking at it: even those that think and work with the ideas all the time. The probability of something is its frequency of occurrences over an infinite sequence of events, or a measure of your belief that something will at that frequency: something like that.. Probablity as an abstract pure math game like geometry seems decent: Statistics seems corrupted by eugenics or something..

@bsmall2 Statistics have the human factor that's what I think the "social context" could mean, not as "pure" or as clean as probability. They depend on the eye of the beholder. You know the saying, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.

@ghostdancer Yeah, I guess. It's not the artist it's the work.. So I should try too learn from Fishers(? Fischer's) math in spite of being irritated that he refused to acknowledge Florence Nightingale in his class, and the other big names that were eugenicists and deserving of the sort of derision Stephen Jay Gould provides in _Wide Hats Narrow Minds_, for Broca (?maybe? of brain-part fame..) I have to see how much farther I can get through the old books before starting _The Ordinal Society_...

@bsmall2 We all have bias, when you know someone's prejudices you can always filter them, as much as we have our own ones, and still is useful. When a teacher is good is good, just take the parts of it that you're interested in and complete with others.

@ghostdancer Lancelot Hogben is interesting for providing the "social context".. I forget where I heard of his _Mathematics for the Millions_ but I've had it for ages and dip into it every once in a while. It was nice to see that 20 years or so after that he wrote books on Chance and Choice (Probability shoulde be "choosability"?) and _Statistical Theory_ He can be hard going though: long ironic sentences, lots of names.. much more demanding of the attention span than newer books I guess...