[R] OT: A philosophical question about statistics

[Kevin Zembower]

Thank you to everyone who responded. I gained a lot of insight into
statistical methods and the nature of statistical thinking. I replied
to some people privately, to limit the traffic on this OT question.

And thank you for the patience of all who were annoyed by this off-
topic question, and who didn't write to complain. I promise to limit
off-topic questions in the future.

-Kevin

On Mon, 2025-05-05 at 15:17 +0000, Kevin Zembower wrote:
> I marked this posting as Off Topic because it doesn’t specifically
> apply to R and Statistics, but is rather a general question about
> statistics and the teaching of statistics. If this is annoying to
> you,
> I apologize.
> 
> As I wrap up my work in my beginning statistics course, I’d like to
> ask
> a philosophical question regarding statistics.
> 
> In my course, we’ve learned two different ways to solve statistical
> problems: simulations, using bootstraps and randomized distributions,
> and theoretical methods, using Normal (z) and t-distributions. We’ve
> learned that both systems solve all the questions we’ve asked of
> them,
> and that both give comparable answers. Out of six chapters that we’ve
> studied in our textbook, the first four only used simulation methods.
> Only the last two used theoretical methods.
> 
> My questions are:
> 
> 1) Why don’t professional statisticians settle on one or the other,
> and
> just apply that system to their problems and work? What advantage
> does
> one system have over the other?
> 
> 2) As beginning statistics students, why is it important for us to
> learn both systems? Do you think that beginning statistics students
> will still be learning both systems in the future?
> 
> Thank you very much for your time and effort in answering my
> questions.
> I really appreciate the thoughts of the members of this group.
> 
> -Kevin
> 
> 
> 
>