> You can't condense all that knowledge in a blog post, one must read the books, though painful that may seem.
No, that's a silly approach. If your, say, launching a web app advice like this [sic] is useful. You dont need or want a deep understanding, you just need the pointers to analyse stuff right.
(as it stands I never mind Zed's tone and when I first read this article it provided some useful info to me in a simple format :)
Also r.e. your first post - from what I recall Zed can be considered some sort of an expert on this stuff.
Ruby ninja, guitar-player extraordinaire, self-taught Statistics expert... wow!!! Zed's propaganda machine rivals that of Kim Yong-il.
Get this: you need deep understanding of the fundamentals, otherwise you're not doing Statistics, you're doing Voodoo Magic. If you learned some Statistics from Zed's post, then you must know even less than he does. But then, one of the many symptoms of ignorance is the false belief that one knows. Do you even realize how many years one needs to become an expert on any field, especially a tough field like Statistics?
I am not saying Zed is wrong, I am merely saying his post is not really that insightful... at least when compared to other essays on Statistics one could read instead. For example, what Cosma Shalizi writes on Statistics is much deeper than what Zed did. Another example: Andrew Gelman has a great blog on Statistics, and he's a true expert.
For me an "expert" is someone who has at least 10 years of experience in one field. An expert on Statistics must have carried out extensive data-analysis work, or must have published original papers. Reading books gives one some understanding, but only when one must solve a problem, does one realize that one's knowledge is utterly superficial.
Zed is no superman. His area of expertise is not Statistics, it's something else. I am not saying he's stupid. All I am saying is that he has not invested the many years of effort into studying Statistics to earn the title of "expert". By calling him an expert, one insults all the true experts out there, the one who do not write blog posts using juvenile language because, you know, they have better things to do... like spending time with their friends and family...
I do think 2 things are happening here though. I think firstly Zed's style doesn't really appeal to you - which is fine, I can see how he wouldn't gel with lots of people. As a result the second thing happens, his content seems irrelevant.
As someone who quite enjoys his approach :) I found quite a bit of useful content. I dont think the point is really to infuse a deep understanding of statistics - it's to correct some common mistakes hackers like us make when playing with stats :)
For example I scanned the blogs of those 2 names you mention and their stuff certainly seems interesting; but frankly I didnt notice anything massively relevant to things I might need to use day to day in my "startup". Zed's stuff I've already taken to heart and corrected some of my "work practices" when dealing with stats.
As to the rest I think it is just a case of differing definitions of expert :) as I said "experienced" is a better word to use - assuming our definitions match :P.
The world changed faster than Statistics. These days, anyone with a computer can analyze data sets, which is awesome. The problem is that the Statistics books are not designed for the masses, and the experts are concerned with technicalities that programmers, for instance, couldn't care less. If Zed helps brings Statistics to the programmers community, I guess that can only be a good thing...
The good news is that there seems to be an opportunity here: write Statistics for the non-statistician. Not everyone who needs Statistics can take 2 years off to learn it. Back in the 1970s, Digital Signal Processing was an advanced grad course... now it's a basic undergrad course. Maybe Statistics will go the same way, becoming more and more prevalent, and less and less ivory tower.
No, that's a silly approach. If your, say, launching a web app advice like this [sic] is useful. You dont need or want a deep understanding, you just need the pointers to analyse stuff right.
(as it stands I never mind Zed's tone and when I first read this article it provided some useful info to me in a simple format :)
Also r.e. your first post - from what I recall Zed can be considered some sort of an expert on this stuff.