Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All (2005)

http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html

by vaksel • 17 years ago

174 113 17 years ago

bena• 17 years ago

I think I've read this before when Zed was "so fucking awesome". Is his whole "dropping the persona" gig just a way to get more mileage out of old articles?

edmccaffrey• 17 years ago

His favorite blog posts are being reposted as essays.

petercooper2• 17 years ago

He's the new PG, with most of the wisdom replaced by machismo.

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

The article does seem familiar, and I think I've even seen it on HN before.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48006

Yep. (There seems to be a slight change in the base URL for the submitted article, but this has been discussed here before.)

Still this is well worth discussing again. It's amazing how much most college-educated people think they know about statistics that they really don't. Two of my favorite quick overview articles about statistics, both by Ph.D. professors of statistics, are "Advice to Mathematics Teachers on Evaluating Introductory Statistics Textbooks"

http://statland.org/MAAFIXED.PDF

(the link is dead because of site maintenance now, but should be fixed soon)

and

"The Introductory Statistics Course: A Ptolemaic Curriculum?"

http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...

Both are thought-provoking articles about what usually isn't taught to undergraduates about statistics.

pasbesoin• 17 years ago

Wayback has a copy of MAAFIXED.PDF (I'm not sure whether it's appropriate / a good idea to include the link).

stcredzero12• 17 years ago

Reminds me of the film clip Alan Kay showed at one of his talks. It was taken at a Harvard graduation, and it shows many, many Harvard graduates, students, and faculty saying that the Earth was warmer in Summer because the orbit takes it closer to the sun.

http://www.sigchi.org/chi98/chikids/vol2/headlines/head2.htm...

travisjeffery• 17 years ago

It's caused by tilt/angle of Earth, correct?

lutorm2• 17 years ago

That's part of a film called "The private universe" (http://www.learner.org/resources/series28.html) about how students can learn stuff in class and then promptly revert to their nonscientific understanding unless they are forced to really confront their prior knowledge in light of what they are being taught. It's a fascinating film.

The importance of explicitly confronting prior knowledge and integrating it into learning is one of the basic principles of learning that came out of the "How People Learn" studies (http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6160).

Herring• 17 years ago

600 days ago & HN was still worried about turning into digg. Plus ça change...

edu• 17 years ago

So after Ruby and Ruby on Rails, Zed has learnt some R and statistics. Because after reading almost all the article, he basically talks about: average, median, standard deviation.

He should learn a little bit of complexity and calculability by the way, best case, worst case, Big O notation, etc.

chollida1• 17 years ago

> So after Ruby and Ruby on Rails, Zed has learnt some R and statistics.

From the article it sounds like he learned stats first.

> studied statistics in grad school,

jerf• 17 years ago

Because when edu writes a blog post, he includes his entire life history, and, for that matter, the entire history of the universe in it.

I know you've already been smacked down but this is a big pet peeve of mine and worth pointing out. You can always complain that something should have had more information in it, and since that is always true no matter what, the complaint is information free. (A value that comes from a universe of one value contributes zero bits of information.)

SapphireSun2• 17 years ago

I'm not so sure about that. A request for more information can be incredibly important (for instance: Tell me who committed the murder! also see: stubs on Wikipedia). Essentially, there is a point of diminishing returns, and after a while, possibly negative returns as the work becomes too hard to assimilate.

However, in this case, I tend to think that Zed included just enough information to get someone who's clueless started - he even included references at the end so that if you DO want more, you can easily get it.

trezor• 17 years ago

I can see some people here claiming this is old (it is) and that it's a repost (it is), but I'll still vote this up, because especially now with people yelling "scaling! scaling!" all over the place, I can't imagine a more fitting time for developers to read this.

Tamerlin• 17 years ago

Scaling? People keep using that word. I don't think it means what they think it means.

dschobel2• 17 years ago

Serious question: who here who has at least a BS in CS didn't have a mandatory stats class where you learned all about picking sample sizes to give you an accuracy you're happy with or that an average without a standard deviation is nigh-meaningless?

It's just a fact of our profession, there is a significant percentage of people who just slap together APIs and have zero understanding of the maths behind it.

I don't see why it takes Zed 1000 words to say it or why he has to get sanctimonious about it.

stcredzero12• 17 years ago

There's a big percentage of programmers who don't understand O(n^2). On multiple occasions, I've seemed as a guru because of this one little tidbit.

What if the medical profession has as much egregious and widespread ignorance of the basics as programming? Would you be in favor of certification?

dschobel2• 17 years ago

We have de facto certification. It's called moving to silicon valley :)

duncanj• 17 years ago

In medical professions, you go through a period of training (clinicals, internship, residency) where people with tons of experience point out that you never learned anything. This humbling experience is not really available in the CS world.

SapphireSun2• 17 years ago

I find this incredibly hard to believe. Anyone who has gone through a single intro course in CS should understand at least the difference between linear and quadratic time. Perhaps I've been in the university too long. Are these people non technical majors who picked up programming in PHP?

megaduck3• 17 years ago

The problem isn't that people know nothing about statistics. The problem is that they think they know more than they actually do. It's fairly easy to get past your "intro to stats" class with only a passing familiarity with the subject and no deep understanding. Only once you truly grasp stats do you realize that you don't actually know anything.

Any statistical formula will predict its own failure. That's kind of mind-blowing, and the implications aren't always grasped after just one semester (or quarter) studying the topic.

m_• 17 years ago

I studied CS and I got past my "intro to stats" class with only a passing familiarity with the subject and no deep understanding (aside from the probability aspects of the course).

The professor was very poor overall. I was able to cram enough to do well, but I retained very little after the final. I would love a deep understanding built from the foundations-- the coursework we had was a lot more obtuse and "take my word for it".

In a sense, I felt I got a better foundation for statistics from a freshman sociology class than from the Math professor.

baguasquirrel• 17 years ago

At CMU we had a mandatory stats class but it didn't have anything concerning sample size picking. Ironically, the stats class I had to take when I was in the humanities dept. was more comprehensive. When I walked into industry, I realized after two or three years that practically everyone I'd met knew jack shit about statistics. I myself learned most of what I know from humanities-major friends and books like NLP by Manning and Schutze.

Having been through what Zed's been through (on both the giving and receiving end to wit), I can empathize with why he'd get all sanctimonious about it, but I feel that it just makes the problem worse (at least in person). Programmers are already an egotistical lot, and I've learned that directly attacking their ego tends to make things worse.

What can be done then? I don't know. It feels like this is at the core a personality problem, in particular one in which people associate their ability to know with their sense of self, and personality problems are terribly hard to correct.

Periodic• 17 years ago

I'm currently doing a CS masters and I did my undergrad in Physics. I'm really glad that I have the background in mathematics and stats that I have. In our physics classes they really drilled into us that although our theory and homework often used exact numbers, no measurement meant anything without a measurement of the error. "A number without error is meaningless", they would say.

One thing I never fully understood was how to calculate the propagation of error. There are many useful tricks for reducing the impact of error on your final calculation, and a few things you need to watch to make sure it doesn't increase.

randome2• 17 years ago

it seems pretty mind boggling that people are that bad at stats ... we have a mandatory stats class for CS ... it doesn't teach some of the stuff mentioned in the article but the stuff mentioned is completely intuitive -- you shouldn't need to take a stats class to understand that.

like if the variance of your result is really high and you're estimating the mean its clear that the number of samples you take is important !?!

megaduck3• 17 years ago

You're proving his point, which is that people's intuition is often dangerously wrong. The sample size is actually often nowhere near as important as your sampling method. For an extreme example, I can conduct a billion coin flips with a weighted coin, but it's going to tell me jack about the general behavior of coin flips. Avoiding sample bias is a hard problem, far harder than most people appreciate.

To complicate matters further, "accuracy" is an extremely tricky concept in statistical analysis because error rates work very differently than they do in, say, physics. In physics, when you measure something you can be sure that your results are accurate, so long as you stay outside your instrument's range of error. In stats, your confidence interval just tells you how likely it is that your results are completely wrong, or even worse, wrong by a completely unknown amount. Every statistical inference you make has a chance of completely blowing up on you. That chance can be defined and reduced, but it can never be eliminated. There's also things like frequentist vs Bayesian statistics, where the interpretation of the same data can be completely different.

Zed may be a jerk sometimes, but on this topic he's dead right. Most programmers are far more confident about this stuff than they should be.

menloparkbum2• 17 years ago

Data point: I am about Zed's age and majored in math and was one class away from a CS double major and I didn't have to take any stats courses. When I was in school stats was a totally different track than what most math people took. For some reason biology and business majors had to take stats but physics and math majors did not. I feel like the physics/math/CS people assumed stats was easy and you'd pick it up as needed.

voberoi2• 17 years ago

I didn't, and I'm graduating with a BS in CS from Stanford in a few weeks. We have an introductory stats requirement, but I found that the stats class I took my sophomore year for my (dropped) economics major was far more enlightening than my CS stats requirement.

I think the fundamental issue is that there's very little focus on statistical practice in most of these courses. Social scientists have it good: they're always taught how to deal with and interpret statistics in the same way they'll have to in their line of work. It's totally useless to throw a bunch of theory at students. I think that teaching statistics in the context of real problems is the only way (most) students will actually learn and come to appreciate how useful it is.

The department revamped the major this year, and they've introduced a mandatory stats class tailored to CS students: cs109.stanford.edu. I haven't looked through it at all, but I think it's a step in the right direction.

Finally, I have to give a shout-out to The Little Handbook of Statistical Practice (http://www.tufts.edu/~gdallal/LHSP.HTM) in this thread. It's an amazing resource for anyone who works with statistics. I've referenced it while doing performance testing, building an A/B testing system, and working on problem sets. From the website:

"My aim is to describe, for better or worse, what I do rather than simply present theory and methods as they appear in standard textbooks. This is about statistical practice--what happens when a statistician (me) deals with data on a daily basis."

Read it now!

lutorm2• 17 years ago

For a different view of how useful statistical practice (when applied mindlessly) is, read "The Black Swan". It's all about how people use statistical models with Normal distributions in places where it's patently unjustified, and the price we pay for it.

I played this game myself with a friend. I sent him ten samples of a (for him) unknown distribution and asked him to estimate the mean. Then 100, then 1000. His estimate of the mean kept changing to higher and higher values, because the samples were drawn from a Pareto (power-law) distribution with a mean of 1000. Such a distribution is almost indistinguishable from one with a mean of infinity, because all the signal is in the very rare, large outliers. If you try to analyze samples from such a process assuming it's Gaussian, nothing will make sense, and the standard deviation will give you an estimated uncertainty of the mean that is far, far below the actual uncertainty.

msluyter• 17 years ago

I hadn't seen this, so I was glad it was resubmitted.

I think he has a fair point. Here on HN I see a lot of armchair sociologists critique the various articles in the social sciences that get posted, but it's rather unclear to me whether these are well grounded in an actual understanding of the issues involved, or simply habitual incantations of rules of thumb such as "correlation doesn't imply causation."

nazgulnarsil3• 17 years ago

um...rules of thumb are a bit different from identifying logical fallacies.

Freaky• 17 years ago

Speaking of statistics, FreeBSD comes with a tool called "ministat", which accepts a bunch of input files filled with numbers and tells you how statistically significant the difference is between them. It's frequently used to demonstrate performance improvements in kernel code:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ministat&apropo...

stcredzero12• 17 years ago

Oh, and you wonder why I say, “he”? I never have this problem with female programmers...I think women are better programmers because they have less ego and are typically more interested in the gear rather than the pissing contest.

When I was hanging out in Homer Alaska, squatting in the tent city on the beach, I heard that on the halibut fishing tours, the women would catch more and bigger fish. (And halibut are big fish. A 25 pound halibut is puny. You can catch 300 pound halibut, and it's not a super-rare event.) This is because the husbands would bring their fishing egos with them from the lower 48 states and not listen to the deckhands. But the wives, with no preconceived ideas, would listen carefully and do things the right way to catch halibut. (As opposed to trout.)

biohacker42• 17 years ago

I wonder if this is a "feature" of women or all minorities? For example, do male nurses show the same egolessness as female programmers?

stcredzero12• 17 years ago

As a minority Irish musician, I find that this seems to have a dampening effect on my ego. (Not 100% sufficient to keep me from making a fool of myself occasionally, though.) It's also caused me to be very, very paranoid about whether or not I "get it" and as a result I've had bouts of beneficial studiousness. And yes, I have to do better to win respect, and sometimes I am judged by my skin color, not my actual playing.

delano• 17 years ago

I might be misunderstanding your comment, but women are not a minority.

http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=male+population+in+no...

wglb• 17 years ago

And Linda Greenlaw is probably the best fisherman anywhere.

chanux• 17 years ago

I always hated stats lecture :( . But the book "Statistics for utterly confused" helped me in exams. But still I'm not in love with stats.

Would he kill me?

Tichy• 17 years ago

I don't like your chances.

jhancock2• 17 years ago

I've read this before. Zed does not provide any details on learning or understanding statistics in this rant.

billswift4• 17 years ago

Statistics and probability is a major course of study - far more than could be usefully taught in a blog. What he tries to do is to motivate people to learn it - which is the first major step to actually learning it.

jhancock2• 17 years ago

ahh..the old "motivation by calling people stupid" trick ;)

ironkeith3• 17 years ago

You know, I've read a bunch of Zed's articles, and I always end up thinking that he's the source of most of his problems. There was a talk I saw him give (can't find the link) to a bunch of college kids where he basically said "phone in your job, do the stuff you love on your own time, everyone else is retarded and they'll never understand you."

Great attitude you have there. I know guys like that; guys who are extremely egotistical, are always right, and know everything about everything. They're team killing, energy sucking, wastes.

He may be able to hack like a dream, and "thanks for Mongrel" and all, but I wouldn't even want to be in the same room as him. I think from now on I'll do my best to ignore Zed's perspectives on life; they're more than a little skewed.

batasrki• 17 years ago

The talk is from CUSEC, probably this one: http://vimeo.com/2723800

As for his "attitude", I've actually met him and talked to him face-to-face. His internet persona is a put-on and he only talks like that to piss people off. In actuality, he's a really nice guy who is super-smart and who does not take shit from people. It's actually too bad that there aren't more of him in our industry. Scope creeps, memory leaks, etc. would be a thing of the past.

ironkeith3• 17 years ago

You are who your project yourself as, and to the billions of people who haven't met him who may stumble across his stuff online, he comes across as a selfish dick. IRL he could be happiness and teddy bears stuffed with sunshine, but so far as I'm concerned if the industry was full of people like him it would be in ruins.

Also, that was the exact video I was talking about, so thanks.

PonyGumbo• 17 years ago

Thanks for posting this. I went from despising Shaw (based on his writings) to kind of liking him.

GHFigs2• 17 years ago

phone in your job

I know the talk you're referring to and he did not say this. He does suggest doing your best and working really hard to make sure your employers get what they want. Do the job you're paid to do and do it well.

What he advises against is going the extra mile for a company that does not trust your judgement and that you have no stake in. Leave work at work. Your job is not your life. You don't owe them anything that they aren't paying for, least of all your creativity.

I don't see how that can be construed as telling them to phone it in.

everyone else is retarded

In fact he points out several times that the people in charge at most companies are not stupid, they're just clueless about technology; not a very contentious statement last I checked. The whole first half of the talk is explaining this to an audience that has has yet to encounter it in the real world, and how to advocate for superior technical solutions in spite of it, with such "team killing, energy sucking" advice as be objective, honest, and prepared for hard technical questions. Truly industry-ruining suggestions.

I strongly suggest you watch the talk again. Even for someone that doesn't like him, you seem to have missed the point of it entirely.

ironkeith3• 17 years ago

You'll forgive my hyperbole, but I was trying to make a point.

What I'm trying to get at is the reason the people in charge of most companies are "clueless about technology" is that some technical people aren't capable of speaking to them in their language. The people in charge are going to be more concerned with how these issues affect their bottom line, if you can't communicate in those terms you'll rarely be effective.

Zed goes on forever about how his solution was technically better in every manner possible, but he was unable to convince the powers that be that he was right. This is a communication issue likely brought about by his "I'm a genius, and you aren't smart enough to understand" attitude. This isn't because business people are arrogant, pig headed assholes (though some certainly are). No, they don't get the tech, but I for one am willing to take the time to help them understand why these things matter and why they should give a shit. Yes, it sucks, but I feel that not doing so would be doing my employer a disservice. What I dislike about that talk is that Zed basically abdicates responsibility for having to communicate with non-technical people because they'll never be smart enough to understand, when it's really his failing that they don't understand in the first place.

Further, Zed's attitude towards others is beyond condescending. He may pay lip service to the people in charge and say "they're just clueless about technology", but it's so abundantly clear how little he values them, and the jobs they provide. "Working hard and doing a good job", but doing something that you know is both wrong and dumb is phoning it in. It's doing what you're supposed to because you couldn't give a shit about the company, or what becomes of it.

It just rubs me the wrong way.

donaq• 17 years ago

They're team killing, energy sucking, wastes.

You do realize that this could have been written by Zed?

grandalf• 17 years ago

I think a better way to help would have been to spend the time writing a blog post introducing some core stats concepts and showing how to use R to do useful things...

callmeed• 17 years ago

Can anyone recommend a decent (read "not boring") book on statistics?

Something along the lines of "Naked Economics" for the stats realm ...

sp332• 17 years ago

There's the Cartoon Guide to Statistics ( http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-Gonick/... ), which, despite its name, is pretty solid and comprehensive book on basics. And definitely not boring!

billswift4• 17 years ago

How to Lie with Statistics (http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...) is a short, enjoyable read. It doesn't tell you how to do statistics, but it gives some warning about common problems.

srn• 17 years ago

Also the manga guide to statistics http://nostarch.com/mg_statistics.htm

nkurz3• 17 years ago

I don't like this article. Yes, he's right: an intuitive knowledge of the relationship between averages and standard deviations is essential. But to presume that the standard tools of statistics should be applied to every problem is to miss the point.

On a superficial level, if you are doing overnight processing of log files, then you probably care more about throughput than latency. In this case, averages are probably a fine metric. On a slightly deeper level, standard deviation is only a useful measure if the distribution is known, and in a lot of real world cases it is not. The right question isn't whether 100 or 1000 tests on the same data provides sufficient statistical power, but whether range of inputs is sufficient to trigger worst case perfomance.

Now, I presume that Zed knows these things and applies them appropriately, but the article strikes me as more snide than helpful. Perhaps as others say he's a great guy in person, but I prefer my stats with less attitude and more insight. Here, for example: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

[edit: changed my sloppy language from 'has no meaning unless to the distribution is normal' to 'is only a useful measure if the distribution is known']

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

On a slightly deeper level, standard deviation only has meaning if the distribution is presumed to be normal

Are you completely sure about that?

I suppose many readers of this thread are more knowledgeable about statistics than I am. I would appreciate hearing from the knowledgeable readers whether or not variance in the observed values makes a difference in the cases discussed in the submitted article.

nkurz3• 17 years ago

Are you completely sure about that?

You could quibble about my exact phrasing, but yes, I'm completely sure about that. This is the 'black swan' problem writ small. I don't mean that a high standard deviation should be ignored for real-world distributions, but I do mean that a low standard deviation carries very little weight unless a normal distribution is presumed.

I'm hard pressed to relate this to the cases discussed in the article, as those cases are shy on detail, but the DB2 example seems most applicable. Although he points to standard deviation as the tell-tale flag here, this is sort of misleading. The exact numerical value for the standard deviation across all queries is meaningless here, as not every query has an equal likelihood of being slow. As he states, the real problem was the terrible performance of an single query.

How many similar queries exist? Will a new query added to the system trigger a similar bug? We don't know, and standard statistics isn't going to help us unless we have an understanding of the underlying mechanism. The key here is not to test a statistically significant subset of all possible queries, but to check the performance of the actual queries executed (as he did).

npk• 17 years ago

The statement "only has meaning if the distribution is presumed to be normal" is wrong. The SD is a summary of the spread of a distribution. In fact, for most centrally concentrated distributions (including a uniform one) +/- 1 sigma corresponds to about 60% of the mass of the distribution. This is an amazingly useful thing to know.

As the above triva factoid points out, the standard deviation is an important summary statistic. More interestingly by using mean, variance (or sd), skew, and kurtosis, you can describe almost any centrally concentrated distribution. Even distribution with heavy tails.

I think what the OP meant is that most 3+ sigma results are not truly 3+ sigma, because most distributions in this world are not gaussian, but instead have large wings. SD is most useful when you know what the underlying distribution is. Currently it's more in fashion to communicate spread using confidence intervals because they presume less about the underlying distribution.

WilliamLP2• 17 years ago

> I think women are better programmers because they have less ego and are typically more interested in the gear rather than the pissing contest.

People need to stop writing shit like this. If it's not okay to say that men are better programmers simply because of their gender (it's not), then it's not okay to say it the other way around either.

tsally• 17 years ago

Exactly. Why not just say that ego tends to prohibit good programmers? Bringing gender into it is hardly necessary, and it actually detracts from the important point about ego.

cellis• 17 years ago

Then again, Zed Shaw isn't exactly known for being PC.

tjic4• 17 years ago

> If it's not okay to say that men are better programmers simply because of their gender (it's not), then it's not okay to say it the other way around either.

God forbid that someone make an argument and try to support it with data, when one person has already decided for all of us what the correct conclusion is.

WT* ever happened to debate, intellectual discourse, and the marketplace of ideas?

This is one of the things that I find most disgusting about political correctness: that it tries to just wall off huge swaths of POTENTIAL CONCLUSIONS based on an argument that boils down to a misconstrued sense of manners (at best) or political preferences (at worst).

Want to say that ethanol is a stupid idea? THE DEBATE IS CLOSED - NO SERIOUS SCIENTIST BELIEVES THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS ANYTHING OTHER THAN A THREAT OF EXTINCTION.

Want to say that women and men have (a) different average heights; (b) different standard deviations in intelligence; (c) different hormone levels; (d) massively different thicknesses in their corpus collosums, and therefore one or the other might on average, make better programmers/accountants/engineers? THE DEBATE IS CLOSED. IT IS UNACCEPTABLE TO SPECULATE ON THIS TOPIC.

I call bullshit on that.

Intellectually honest people respond to facts and arguments with OTHER facts and arguments.

Intellectually dishonest people try to shut down debates using social control.

WilliamLP writes

"People need to stop writing shit like this"

That's the phrase of a bully, and/or a censor.

sofal• 17 years ago

I think you have some interesting points. I'm going to play Devil's advocate:

An assumption that you make there is that all forms of social control used for discouraging debates/speculation on certain topics are inherently bad or stem from dishonesty. It could be that knowing in advance the emotional, legal, political, or otherwise time-wasting repercussions that a certain type of debate causes justifies avoiding the discussion altogether. None of us go after truth in a completely unbiased manner with no agendas whatsoever, though we may fool ourselves in thinking so.

There doesn't seem to be any disagreement about the social rule of not discussing politics or religion in this forum. We don't think of this as a moral rule, but then what are morals?

illumen• 17 years ago

It's wrong because it's a faulty abstraction.

It's generalising. That is, assuming that one or many things are one way just because some things are one way.

Just because one person is one way, doesn't mean they all are, or even mostly are.

I hope you now see why it is FUCKING STUPID TO BE A SEXIST, racist or any other kind of generalist.

Best regards, hugs, kiss, love,

ps. sorry for the non-capital PC parts.

ilitirit2• 17 years ago

> God forbid that someone make an argument and try to support it with data

That's well and fine, but the author stated an opinion based on anecdotal evidence. On its own though, I think it's a really stupid thing to say but I think it fits fine given the tone of his rant.

While I do agree with your central point, I don't think there's any value in exploring whether or not women might make better programmers on average. If I were to hire someone, I'd base it on their past experience and how well the interview(s) went, not their race or sex. There's no harm in speculating and even doing the research if it interests one that much though, just like there's no harm in researching whether or not painting red stripes on your car will make it go faster.

WilliamLP2• 17 years ago

Whether the statement (that women are better programmers) is actually true, or whether it belongs to Paul Graham's set of things you can't say doesn't even matter here.

It was not presented as a nuanced statistical statement. (Ironically, in an article about how statistical statements need to be more nuanced!) It was presented as a boorish, stupid, and unsupported assertion completely irrelevant to the focus of the article.

There are a few "debates" which should be shut down using social control. Among them are the ones that attempt to box people in and remove their individuality by asserting that some subset of their humanity is the most important thing about them in some context.

You don't need to cite a blog post to do that. There also are many debates which for all intents and purposes are closed, and for which social control or even condescension are appropriate. (NO SERIOUS SCIENTIST BELIEVES THAT THE EARTH IS 6000 YEARS OLD, OR THAT MERCURY IN VACCINES COULD BE A CAUSE OF AUTISM.)

petercooper2• 17 years ago

Why? You can say whatever you like if you can back it up with analysis. Not to do so is pointless political correctness.

Car insurance companies believe that young male drivers are a bigger risk than older female drivers. They have statistics to back this up. Saying that young, male drivers are worse drivers is not ageist or sexist. This sentence is not judging individuals but a demographic group (i.e. it would be wrong for me to say you are a worse driver than someone else, if I had no proof).

The problem with judging programmers in this way is that it's hard to empirically measure results or to even agree what metrics are good or bad.

jfarmer• 17 years ago

That's a lot of text to say not much more than "Standard deviation can be as important as the mean; be careful about confounding variables; and if you're an engineer, spend more time learning statistics."

Oh, also, "You're all assholes and I rock."

Truly the Carl Sagan of software.

kl4m• 17 years ago

Why is he mixing computer science with programming? Computer science is just a branch of mathematics. It has not much to do with what he talks about afterwards.

billswift4• 17 years ago

Computer science is to programming as physics is to engineering. The way SOME programmers constantly put down computer science, especially academic computer science, is a sign of the anti-professionalism in the field. (I decided I better emphasize some programmers since they actually seem to be a very vocal minority.)

randome2• 17 years ago

pat on the back for you -- you understand intro college statistics... maybe you just work with shitty programmers that don't understand statistics????? i dunno but most of my colleagues know stats pretty damn well. but maybe thats just because i'm in school

enki• 17 years ago

i think we'll have a huge shortage of programmers shortly

voberoi2• 17 years ago

I think this article is great once you get past the rant-iness of it. He makes a bunch of valid points and it's true: a lot people actually don't take these pretty crucial details into account when they're dealing with statistics.

It's kind of a shame that his message is diluted by its delivery. Case in point: about half of the comments here aren't even about statistics!

ThomPete• 17 years ago

99% of all statistics are made up

nathanwdavis• 17 years ago

I love it when Zed Shaw gets pissed. It's fun!!

Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All (2005)

Related Stories