I happen to tell people I’m a statistician—because it’s true, and because I didn’t learn from the first 10,000 times someone heard that, turned around, and left without a word. The always run away, except in one case… If they stay, I know they are

a. a Ph.D. Student and

b. having a very bad time and therefore

c. about to ask me pointed questions about their methodology section, what is a t-value and a p-score, why there are two xis, and whether it’s too late to prevent Bonferonni, Hochberg, Holmes, Benjamini, and Šídák from ever publishing they terrible ideas. (Yes.)

I’ve been confronted with utter confusion in every field of knowledge, including art history, and literature. It’s a miracle we make any progress in science, but I wholeheartedly blame *how we teach statistics*. It’s, at best, a dark cult that requires sacrifices to obscure gods, and most likely three cargo cults in a trench coat. Conditioning scientific discussion to passing under the Caudine forks of Greek letters incantations isn’t helping us. We need a reform.

There is no problem with people looking at black holes, counting cells in a Petri dish, or trying to define inflation. If it hurts when you touch your forehead, your thigh, your elbow, and your knee, it means your finger is broken. There is one thing in common between all those people: the three-hour elective on stats taught by someone who had the social skills of a door hinge, the clarity of VentaBlack, and the patience of a toddler on cocaine.

There are amazing statisticians who explain things beautifully. Get them to teach, and people will finally grok uncertainty. They’ll see how clumsy are most of the methodologies pre-approved by reviewers because it was used in the same journal before. We ask the most critical minds of our generation to challenge the status-quo. They know how. They just need to know what the status-quo actually means.