Greetings,
I greatly enjoyed teaching statistics at the university this semester.
In today’s newsletter, I talk about why you should avoid statistics in your own life.
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
—George E.P. Box
✏️ ‘Regression’ to the mean
Statistics is the science of uncertainty.
If we could measure anything and everyone, there would be no need for statistics — we could say with complete certainty whether a treatment works well or some population is at greater risk than another.
But we don’t know everything, and thus must rely on statistical inference to understand our world. But like most things in life, when the means becomes the ends, it begins to take on an alternative and ugly shape.
Modern culture has erroneously begun to treat statistics as definitive truth. As consequence, we treat most issues, and most people, as simple statistical averages; mere replicas of the mean. But statistics, by definition, leaves out its essential element: the individual. In other words, the statistical average represents everybody and nobody at the same time.
I fear this pervasive and growing mentality will erode the variability and uniqueness that makes humanity so great and interesting.
The best ideas and the greatest minds have almost always been outliers. Yet we increasingly educate people in a way that wrings all self-reliance and unique thought out of them. This is best encapsulated by the current LLM craze — language models are text prediction models, that by definition generates ‘statistically average’ content. Anyone who has critiqued the work of a typical undergraduate can testify to this. I predict (no pun intended) that in the next 10 years, writing will literally and metaphorically be so average that there will be few living examples of individual style in the writing realm for us in our daily lives. Simply because the convenience and permissibility of AI writing will make the pursuit of mastery of the written word a bad bet in the eyes of most.
Statistics has its rightful uses. But when it comes to developing one’s mind and soul, avoid any process or practice which operates based on statistical average. The only universal prescription for greatness is to insist on yourself.
magna est vis consuetudinis
great is the power of habit
💡 Food for Thought
Keep your goals away from the trolls.
🔗 Sunday Best
The Gettysburg Address with Larry McEnerney
Ask most people and they’ll tell you that good writing should be 1) clear, and 2) organized. But is that really it?
Larry McEnerney, former director of the University of Chicago Writing Program, returned to the European Speechwriter Network conference in 20204 to continue his analysis of the Gettysburg Address.
6 BIG Biographies I want to Read!
I just impulse-purchased 5 of the books on this list. I have no regrets — I like big biographies and I cannot lie.
Working Retail By Coachella Fest Friday Night INSANITY
The 7-11 guy just came out with a heater video.
If the whole ‘academia’ thing doesn’t work out for me I think I’ll pivot to part-time YouTube / gas-station clerk.
A man without mythology is merely a product of statistics.
—Carl Jung
See you next week!
AT