Flush It Friday: Statistical Alchemy
Welcome back to Flush It Friday, our weekly chance to piss and moan about something totally inconsequential in the grand scheme of life while offering a brief glimpse at fleeting happiness and fulfillment. This week I’m here to share my thoughts on the good, the bad, and maybe even a little bit of the ugly. Ch-ch-ch-check it out!
The bad: Mark Twain once claimed that there are “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” What you’re likely unaware of is that statisticians are actually a secret cult that banded together innumerable eons ago to confound the works of man. If not for statisticians, we would all be flying around Mars with our eco-friendly jet packs and completely avoiding any chance of traffic fatalities. It would sort of be like pre-alcohol Ireland. But no, every new innovation needs “statistically significant proof” this and “demonstrable results” that.
What’s worse is that statisticians, like a band of nerdy warlocks, are content to keep their arcane knowledge securely locked up next to their DnD boards and virginity, out of the hands of those who might actually utilize it for the benefit of mankind. “Oh, you don’t know how to fit this data to an auto-regressive integrated moving-average time series? You should have been a statistician. Then you’d know it.” Thanks, Melkor. I’ll just rewrite history so that I learn it. I promise the p-value will be less than 0.05.
The good: I got a new sweater last week, and it looks amazing on me. Soon, my wardrobe will consist entirely of a glorious, fuzzy collection of sweaters. I can hear your envy from here. It sounds like your teeth chattering because your non-sweater-garbed body is cold.
The ugly: I was forced to eat Little Caesar’s this week. The results were not pretty.
That’s it from me. Now it’s your turn. What do flush? What do you hail? Do you actually like cardboard with ketchup smeared on it. Open swim, y’all!
