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Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

>my professor projected video of himself writing on a piece of paper before a very large auditorium, and that guy was left-handed, and so his hand would cover his notes for like the entire time and it was impossible to see what he was writing. I only figured out that this was why it was so unpleasant like halfway through the class.

So many of my college math classes had some version of this professor who took a fascinating subject like linear algebra, statistics or algorithms and made it into a slog. The fact that most stats is taught by getting students to just memorize random ideas rather than building up a holistic and intuitive view really is a travesty.

Also makes sense why so many people, even though they took stats in college, hav e such a poor understanding of probability.

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The fact that most stats is taught by getting students to just memorize random ideas rather than building up a holistic and intuitive view really is a travesty.

We don't need first principals thinking for every thing. Granted, this comment is a bit vague, so I don't know how exactly you were taught or which type of class we're talking about, but generally, you can accept some axioms in applied mathematics classes. If we're talking the bare minimum classes like in the article (for apparently a business degree), this is likely a general applied prob/stat. Things tend to get more in depth with more advanced pure mathematics courses.

There's a middle path between rote memorization of outcomes, and building everything up from first principles. And I'm guessing it's probably what the parent poster had in mind.

A great statistics textbook along these lines is Principles of Statistics by MG Bulmer. It's one of those Dover classic textbooks that you can get for cheap. This book assumes you already know basic calculus and combinatorics. It then goes through a series of practical problems, and shows how you can use calculus or combinatorics to solve them. And, along the way, an intuitive and holistic perspective on statistics begins to form.

The overall effect is great. It's a lot like a 3blue1brown video series, only from the 1960s, and with problem sets.

We don't need first principals thinking every time, but having an understanding of why you can't just test 100 variations of your hypothesis and accept p=0.05 as "statistically significant" is important.

Additionally it's quite useful to have the background to understand the differences between Pearson correlation and Spearman rank, or why you might want to use Welch's t-test vs students, etc.

Not that you should know all of these things off the top of your head necessarily, but you should have the foundation to be able to quickly learn them, and you should know what assumptions the tests you're using actually make.

I get where you're coming from, and obviously there are practical limitations on how deep one can and should go in an introductory class. But my recollection of AP Statistics 15 years ago is that, because the exam and therefore curriculum was so focused on running various tests on a TI-84, I learned way more about using this one specific graphing calculator than about statistics. I got a high score on the exam, but I never felt like I understood any of it until I got to college and took a statistics course that actually used calculus to show what was going on.

Intuition isn’t synonymous with working from first principles. You can have a very intuitive understanding of something you only understand at a higher level. Indeed, this is true for many applied mathematicians.

Left-handed I could handle. Opaque accents seem to warrant some sort of consumer protection action by authorities.

the reality is the vast majority of students have no interest in seeing the beauty of any mathematical or technical field.

they want the professor to tell them the passwords they need to memorize. then on the exam they repeat the passwords and get an A. this is understandable though because they are under a lot of pressure and these days nobody can afford to fail.

if the teaching style deviates from this they become annoyed, leave poor course reviews, and that professor has a hard time.

the professor could overcome this by being "good" -- when the students say a professor is "good" they mean it is easy to get an A.

In health care there have been studies that find an inverse correlation between patient satisfaction scores and patient outcomes. I don't know if the same is true in education, but I'd believe it.

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