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   Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 23:26:58 JST Sexy Moon

   in reply to

   • myrmepropagandist
   • Ted Gould
   @ted @futurebird the society-critical parts of "statistics" is probably identifying bullshit and estimating scale of effect and you can do this through a small set of heuristics without ever teaching statistical methods proper.
   • Embed this notice
     Ted Gould (ted@social.gould.cx)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 23:27:07 JST Ted Gould

     in reply to

     • myrmepropagandist

     @futurebird really great points.

     I have advocated for adding stats to the base curriculum because I feel like it has become critical to exist in our society. Feels like even a weather forecast requires a little understanding of stats. Much less things like elections.

     But having a well thought out curriculum is key. And I don't think stats should ever be a capstone for math students. Everyone needs it.

     Do you think there is a way to fit "stats literacy" in without replacing another course?

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     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 23:27:08 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     If the argument is that stats ought to be that well developed I agree.

     I also think that working with data sets, and reading data presentations should be a bigger part of social sciences education, and science education.

     But it's not like there is a fully formed educational version of statistics that exists that could be dropped in to replace all the things that calculus is trying to do... at the moment.

     4/4

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     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 23:27:10 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     But there is an even more fundamental danger in trying to quickly pull away from calculus to some other math subject as the "capstone" of most programs. I don't think many of the people considering the change understand the magnitude of what they are trying to do.

     Calculus has been refined and developed as subject for math education for decades and decades. From theory to problem sets huge sets of material have been refined by thousands of people-- stats isn't so well developed. 3/

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     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 23:27:11 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     The subtext is that statistics is somehow "easier" than calculus since it's more connected to the "real world" --

     But, nothing about real world problems is easy. Real world problems are harder, require more experience, more analysis, are less susceptible to canned techniques and strategies.

     And more importantly it's hard to really understand much about statistics without knowing some calculus. Not a popular opinion. I know. 2/

   • Embed this notice
     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 23:27:12 JST myrmepropagandist

     Another teacher asked me an interesting question today. "What do you think about this idea of replacing calculus with statistics. After all statistics is more useful."

     That's probably true on the surface, but I can't say I'm a huge fan of the "replace calc with stats" craze... even as I lament the poor understanding many people have of stats. It's obvious we need more education on interpreting datasets and visualizations.

     But, there is a subtext to this argument I dislike. 1/