Yesterday, I deleted all my Random Tuesday Thoughts posts.
I really don't want to clutter up this blog and I know people are here to see me make art, dammit!
I thought about keeping the posts, just as a record of what was, but then thought, "Nah." They were kind of inorganically shoe-horned into my blog and so they'll just be gracefully deleted.
I was about to remove myself from the Random Tuesday Thoughts lineup of bloggers, but when I went to do it, I found that I had been removed!
Perhaps I wasn't random enough. Or maybe something didn't register. Who knows, but it fits in with my world (blog) view.
But I did lose something in yesterday's post that I wanted to repost (and it doesn't involve me painting). Life offers us many opportunities to have do-overs, but it's up to us to make use of them. It's a gift to be able to apologize, to make right, to start over, to try something else.
So I wanted to share (again) that my experience of learning statistics as an adult is different from how I learned math as a child; I actually enjoy it and one way I enjoy it is by relating mathematical concepts to philosophy. For example:
A binomial probability distribution has only two outcomes: A and Not-A.
In plain English, this means the outcomes of a binomial probability distribution are not opposites like heads/tails or yes/no but complements, such as heads and not-heads or yes and not-yes.
This sounds like a concept in Buddhism, where karma-producing action is not "countered" with inaction, but non-action.
It's not exactly dualistic, black-and-white thinking. Stretches the mind, don't it?
There’s a beauty and elegance to mathematics I can almost appreciate, but I feel like I’m walking through The Louvre without my glasses.
Invite Beauty,
I.
There’s a beauty and elegance to mathematics I can almost appreciate, but I feel like I’m walking through The Louvre without my glasses.
Invite Beauty,
I.
5 comments:
(Perhaps the Random Tuesday blogroll is monthly and requires re-registration on those month you want to participate?)
My mind IS stretched! It always is when you are involved.
What can be more beautiful and meaningful than finding how a random screen of numbers relate to each other in a manner that is complex, predictable, and (clinically) relevant? There is order in that chaos that is waiting to be uncovered and appreciated. It thrills (yes, THRILLS!) me to think of statistics again through your current academic adventures. I miss the excitement of finding significance and equally so in discovering the pieces of the puzzle that contribute much more minimally to the overall variance than hoped. In the way a musical sees notes on a page and hears music, in the way a philosopher sees random events and ascribes meaning (unless he's one of those dang nihilists), (psychological) statisticians see numbers and extracts better understanding of disorder and treatment protocols with greater effectiveness. Rejoice in statistics! <--I'm completely serious, here!
Yeah, I don't know why I didn't make it on the blogroll. It could be totally technical but for whatever reason, it ended up saving me the trouble of finding out how to un-blogroll myself.
I'll still enjoy reading others' Random Thoughts. The funny/scary thing is, I hardly ever consider their thought processes random! (I tend to track word salad pretty well, tee hee!)
By the way, your enthusiasm for stats is catchy!
I think one of my difficulties (which I'll resolve today) has to do with the lack of explanation in the textbook of the names of things.
"Sampling distribution" confuses me because I can't conceptualize what is being distributed with regards to one statistic of a sample.
"Central Limit Theorem" likewise confuses me. What's the central limit?
Anyway, it's all fascinating. There are actually people who study lines of people to reduce waiting in them--they use "queue theory." Can you believe it?? So cool.
Btw, are you using a statistics textbook or a statistics for social science textbook? The former goes into greater depth and satisfied the curious and intellectual thinker better; the latter spews sufficient information for passing state exams, familiarizing readers to the key terms of scientific articles, etc. Meaning, I wonder if your problem is with the conceptualization of your book and not the conceptualization of statistics itself.
All I can say is that the stats for psych books used by the PsyD's always confused me because there wasn't enough explanation for anything.
It's a statistics book, but it's elementary statistics, so maybe that's why the author doesn't go into too much detail.
I asked my professor to clarify and she did, but I think overall it just doesn't go into a lot of depth about certain things because it'll be explained in later chapters or maybe in more advanced classes than mine.
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