There are people who do use statistics to understand the social behavioral groups to which you belong, and therefrom decide how better to appeal to you, even manipulate you. I know; I’m one of them. You could worse than to understand statistics as a means of knowing how these organizations operate.

Beyond that, though, it doesn’t follow that a poorly written textbook in a badly taught class about a given field means the field itself is worthless. If so, then every field of endeavor is worthless.

I bore two boys, raised them, I have undergone open heart surgery and I have NEVER experienced the level of frustration and pain as I have had in this statistics class.

The textbook is POORLY written and the online venue? DON’T have anything to do with Pearson!
I would rather eat glass, drive a pencil through my eye AND walk on coals then to put up with this crap.

There has been nothing my whole life, that could not be figured out by using just addtion, subtraction, multiplying and dividing. The plus? No STUPID rules, that if this happens, then use this or if there is this do this. PLAAEEEEZE! Who thought this junk up????

secondly, are the textbooks. while an extension of classroom practices described above, textbooks are a living testimony to a number of misapplied conclusions of statisticians. first is this overarching assumption that statistics are relevant when it is my belief that their over-application in every facet of life, opinion making and goofy poll has rendered them trivial.

secondly, a student viewing a textbook must wonder precisely who is the textbook being written for. one senses the author is beaming with pride at how clever they are when using marbles, or another silly toy, that shares no commonality with a human life. suffice to say, they must be writing for amusement and their fellow statisticians/academics who perhaps have long forgotten what it is like to be a student. the presentation and materials are red-zone convoluted, and not necessarily for human consumption.

you don’t get it because once one reaches a certain acumen concerning a subject there is a danger of becoming biased and chauvinistic. you don’t understand because the world turns upside down: there are those that do and those that don’t, and obviously the ones that don’t are the ones with the problem. those that do merely become entrenched without a notion, or intention i might add, to look towards themselves as perhaps being the major cause of the problem. no, that can’t be.

look, one size don’t fit all; and when you are talking about a subject as complicated and nuanced as statistics, the axiom described above becomes even more prevalent. it can be viewed by the consumer as “garbage in – garbage out”. because if you are betting on your appreciation for statistics to translate into an overall productive experience for all then you need to conduct some studies. some would go like this:

1. how many college-level statistics instructors are actually qualified to teach?

2. how many college-level statistics instructors are simply in the classroom for a paycheck?

3. are students qualified to critique textbooks and, if so or not, are the gawds of statistics even interested?

4. could those that teach statistics even handle the criticism, and do they even care?

perhaps statistical analysis has already taken place concerning the cost-benefit of presenting statistics for mass consumption. maybe, through your prism a determination was made to do some “weeding out”, because surely many of those seemingly incapable of understanding statistical concepts have a deficiency in abstract thinking. of what use are they?

it doesn’t take statistics to understand the shoddy nature by which it is presented in the classroom and texts. it requires an inward look at why this chosen approach is maintained. but that requires an admission of sins on the part of academics and the will to navigate their overall abysmal teaching in a new direction.

These ‘Fantasy Sports’ enthusiasts constitute a major industry and in some cases (most notably baseball) have changed the way the sport itself is played.

It was so bad that our queuing theory professor realized after two lectures that no student understood probability and statistics enough to understand queuing theory, so he spent two weeks of his own class teaching us what we should have already known.

I can relate to many of the above posts. One of the things that I see often is that by the time students have reached statistics, they have a relationship with math. Most every student who dislikes math can tell me what grade and what teacher did it in for them. It’s not statistics per se, it’s often emotional.