Tuesday afternoon, I was about half finished with my first rough
draft of this column, when a friend rode up on his Harley.
Tuesday afternoon, I was about half finished with my first rough draft of this column, when a friend rode up on his Harley. He had come to drop off the T-shirts and tickets that Anne and I will use while we serve garlic ice cream this weekend. We are ecstatic at being able to volunteer in this particular way; it is so quintessentially Garlic Festival.
My friend has a bachelors in mathematics and a masters in statistics; he uses statistics in his day job and teaches it part-time at Gavilan. So I asked him to read Mr. Scott’s letter of July 14, and favor me with his opinion.
“Well'” he answered judiciously, “I don’t remember the name of this particular fallacy, but what he’s doing here is insulting you a whole bunch, then saying that 2 + 2 = 4.”
Bingo.
The element of truth in Mr. Scott’s current letter is his statement that z-scores are derived from an integral. (My friend pointed out that this particular integral is unintegrable, which I had forgotten.)
As my friend has not been following the debate carefully, it escaped his attention that in addition to insult, Mr. Scott exhibits a certain carelessness regarding matters of fact.
For example, his opening paragraph begins:
“Cynthia Walker has returned from her field trips” – actually, I have not been on any recently – “and political indoctrination camps.” I have been to no camps at all recently, never been to a political indoctrination camp, and have no plans to go to any.
“It is nice to see that the hordes of evil Union soldiers did not get the better of her.” Ah! Light dawneth. Mr. Scott, I do not go to Civil War reenactments. My 14-year-old daughter does. She reenacts as a Union soldier, and is a very nice little girl, not evil at all.
I have no idea whether Mr. Scott suffers from poor reading comprehension, or whether he is deliberately trying to twist things. Regardless of his intent, when he demonstrates that much error in his first two sentences, I wonder how anyone can believe any of his subsequent words.
When Mr. Scott has no data, he makes assumptions, and his assumptions are often erroneous. For example, Harvey Mudd College has no “ivy covered, (sic) halls.” It has wart-covered walls instead.
The class I took was not Mr. Scott’s imaginary “Probability and Statistics for Engineers.” It was just plain Probability and Statistics, a mathematics department offering, taught by a Ph.D. mathematician.
The difference between the course I took and elementary statistics is analogous to the difference between “Hamlet” and “The Bobbsey Twins.” It is not merely, as Mr. Scott asserts, the addition of six minor topics.
In elementary statistics, one is provided with the z-score table and told: “This is based on an integral. Accept it.” In Prob and Stat, every topic is proved rigorously and mathematically. Calculus is a prerequisite because most of the proofs involve derivation, integration, or partial differentiation. (I know this because I have been re-reading the textbook. I hope I do not have to re-learn P-Chem to justify any columns. P-Chem was hard.)
Judging by the letters to the editor written by Mr. Scott and his students, he has succeeded very well in teaching them to insult people. He has convinced them that he, and they, his acolytes, are the only ones who can tell whether the use of statistics is valid in any given case: an interesting opinion, given the prevalence of engineers, mathematicians, and physicists in this valley.
Worst of all, he has convinced them that statistics is rarely, if ever, useful. His mantra is: “This is a misuse of statistics!” He reminds me of a business teacher my eldest son had at Gavilan, who spent entire class periods complaining to the students. He hated business; he had wanted to be a basketball coach, but his parents forced him to study business. I cannot imagine how Mr. Scott expects his students to attempt to master a subject when he repeatedly tells them it is useless.
And his recipe for fixing what ails GUSD? Retain more teachers and pay them more. I would like to see a statistically valid justification for that course of action.
