Skip to main content

Is calculus or statistics more useful for non-science/ math majors? Why?

This is an excellent question to ask, and it happens to be one of those questions where the answer is actually very clear. Statistics wins. Whether you see yourself in a career based in the humanities, law, or business, statistics will give you essential tools for getting along in our modern society. It's like learning civics. It's something that everybody needs.


I say this as someone who has great respect for the power and importance of calculus. Calculus is the intellectual gateway for understanding how, in quantitative terms, systems change. It's essential in physics and engineering, and important for natural scientists in many other fields. It's also -- like music theory, logic, geometry, and other abstract studies -- great stuff to know about.


If it's a question of either/ or, though, the answer is statistics. Statistics is crucial for becoming an intelligent consumer of information in the modern world. 


When you lack training in statistics, you're an easier target for misinformation. People are constantly making claims about numbers that affect your everyday life, local community, workplace, and nation. Statistics helps you make sense of these claims. 


It also helps you put important everyday problems to the test. Is your school, workplace, or government showing favoritism towards certain people? Statistics gives you the tools to test whether certain things happen more than they ought to happen, under the assumption that everyone is being treated equally. It allows you to identify circumstances that seem too good to be true (i.e., really unlikely). It allows you to set up objective tests for whether, say, your company really is selling more widgets since you began the new ad campaign, or whether claims about the latest unemployment statistics really show what a politician says they show, or whether it really is all that damning that a defendant's DNA test matched a forensic sample.


Statistics also helps you put your own, personal data in perspective. How good or bad was that last test score of yours? If you take a medical test, what are the chances that you'll be incorrectly identified as suffering from the disease? What are the chances that you'll be given a false negative -- a result that incorrectly concludes you are healthy when you actually have the disease in question? In serious medical situations, understanding statistics can protect you from dangerous misunderstandings. It can keep you from panicking unnecessarily or being overconfident about the results of a test.


Being familiar with statistics will also help you understand how science works. Virtually all experimental science that affects your everyday life depends on statistical analysis. Scientists don’t just give one group a green pill, another a placebo, and then decide that the green pill is effective because more of the people who took the green pill got better. Scientists have to analyze their results statistically in order to decide if the difference between groups was large enough to conclude that the green pill really made a difference.


What does it mean when scientists say they found a "statistically significant" difference? Sometimes, it means very little in the real world because the effect itself was actually very small. Studying statistics will help you be sensitive to these things and empower you to be a more active consumer of the latest scientific claims.


Finally, I want to address the question of intellectual stimulation. You might think statistics sounds like a lot of practical but boring stuff -- not appealing to somebody who loves to think about deep ideas. There are some intriguing things to think about in your introductory stats class, though. You'll learn some theory about probability, which has interesting philosophical implications.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

etymology - Origin of the greeting "Sweet dreams".

Does anybody know the etymology of the phrase "sweet dreams"? I tried googling but did not find anything satisfying. Is this a relatively new phrase of the modern world or has this been in use for some time? I think it's the latter one. Answer The OED has the interjection as "a farewell to someone going to bed" from the 20th century: 1908 Sears Roebuck Catal. 198/1 Tenor Solos..Good Bye, Sweet Dreams, Good Bye. But it goes back until at least the 19th and possibly 18th centuries. John Wolcot, writing under the pseudonym of Peter Pindar, used it in his poem "Orson and Ellen; A Legendary Tale" published in 1801: Also from 1801 in The infernal Quixote (Page 287) by Charles Lucas: In the March 1776 of The Universal Magazine was published "The Serenade. A Pastoral Tale. From the German of Gesner" , where the shepherd Daphnis watches over his beloved as she sleeps and sings: The same tale appears in 1776's as Idyl XI, " Daphnis ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What are the similarities between the relationships of the characters in The Outsiders and Romeo and Juliet?

At first glance, it might appear as if the characters in  The Outsiders  by S. E. Hinton and  Romeo and Juliet  by William Shakespeare do not have much in common; however, when one isolates the core of the conflicts, it becomes clear that the relationships in both stories are rooted in rivalry and secrecy.  In both  The Outsiders  and  Romeo and Juliet , an overarching theme is rivalry. While   socioeconomic status separates the greasers from the Socs in The Outsiders , last names separates the Montagues from the Capulets, who appear to be relatively equal in terms of socioeconomic status. Due to these rivalries, there are instances of deadly interactions in both stories. In  The Outsiders , Johnny kills Bob (whether his actions were justified or not is debatable). In  Romeo and Juliet , Romeo kills Tybalt and Paris, and Tybalt kills Mercutio. These deaths have profound effects on the main characters. In Ponyboy's case, the Johnny's death and other events in the novel inspire h...
Post a Comment
Read more