Posts Tagged statisticians

“Decisions taken by statistical professionals are final”

I’m just catching up on the Wall Street Journal issues that accumulated while I attended a statistical conference and then co-taught a workshop on Designed Experiments for Life Sciences.  A June 3rd article by WSJs “Numbers Guy” Carl Bialik caught my eye with a graphic showing that most UK citizens distrust official statistics.  This caused their government to create a Statistics Authority that will police other agencies on the numbers they release to the public.  Here some key points as reported at this UK government web site:

  • When preparing any publication containing statistics, including those drawn from administrative or management information, you must involve statistical professionals at the earliest opportunity
  • You must not use unpublished statistics without the advice of a statistical professional
  • You must not selectively quote favourable data from any unpublished dataset
  • Decisions taken by statistical professionals are final
  • So it seems that the number nerds will rule after all — just like they always dreamed when being belittled by the bullies who thought math and stats were simply a waste of time. Statisticians rule!

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