How would it overlap or differ from 'Statistical Rethinking'?
This is widely regarded as the most accessible intro textbook to Bayesian statistics.
Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
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Re: Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
#22Aren't a zillion statistics books out there already? Yes I've been wanting to read one, and Wikipedia also has lots of good statistics articles. I've been wanting to work through Freedman and Pisani's book but you know how it goes. It's supposed to be excellent.
Re: Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
#23[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
#24Yes foundations of agnostic statistics and all of statistics
Re: Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
#25I took my first statistics class as an evening course, before going to graduate school, and 90% of the work involved doing hand calculations, avg., variance, std. dev., z-scores, t-tests, etc. And I think that gave me a strong grasp of those fundamentals.
If you could do something similar for bayesian statistics I think that would be useful, but not necessarily popular.
Re: Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
#26My personal opinion is that statistics textbooks usually come from a prescriptive perspective, and that makes it challenging for the reader to get visceral intuition for what is actually going on. Any reader would be far better off just visualizing the damn distribution / samples and using reasonable judgement, instead of implicitly assuming a Gaussians distribution and blindly memorizing tests / formulae. Making the…
How do you make 'reasonable judgements'? How do you tell whether someone else made reasonable judgements? How do you judge other people's intuition?
Modelling distributions explicitly sounds nice, yes.
Re: Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
#27I would read it
Re: Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
#28Definitely there’s an interest for visual pedagogical content. However a book nowadays may not be the most effective way to reach a wider audience, instead of a video or an interactive website. I guess that combining these other media may help you reach more people to get interested in the book.
Another exemple of a successful visual pedagogical content is: https://www.byhand.ai/
Re: Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
#29Even if I would not read it back to back on release, it would be a pleasure to have a reliable and citable reference on hand. Whenever I stumble upon new complex problems, outside of the regular, often fairly repetitive statistical questions of my field, I need to rely on many searches and LLM queries to find my answer. I wonder if a book could actually replace all that, but it would be my first place to check.
Re: Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
#30Yes, I’d read it.
But beware of opinions.
Don’t let people put you down, especially here in HN, where people are perceived to smart. Smart doesn’t equal sensible or unbiased.
Many books are written to scratch the itch of the author. Just like an open source project. It is a work of love.