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

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?

It's a very old post.

I read this in 2005.

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.