YHK - yet another hacker news clone

25 points usernametaken29 1 day ago 13 comments

I had a classic Bayesian statistical education throughout my undergraduate and grad years and I’ve come to conclude that the plethora of books offered are pretty bad.

For me personally statistics is intuitive if illustrated properly. A great example is https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/

I was wondering whether it would make sense to turn the intuitions behind statistics into a book. Would anyone read it? Do people still read stats books or would it be mostly a waste of effort? If you wanted to teach/help people understand statistics, what resources would you consider?

aghuang 23 hours ago | parent

It depends on what parts of statistics is being taught and the application of each of the leanings and how it relates to the real world.

More generally, I would buy a statistics if it is linked to today's interesting technological breakthroughs and also if it comes as a distilled version for beginners.

mdspan 23 hours ago | parent

Having also studied statistics in university (undergrad), something I kept running into is that you can't really unlock the intuition for many concepts without taking more advanced courses. For example, degrees of freedom shows up as early as AP Statistics, but even a non-rigorous visual explanation of it leans on linear algebra, which most students don't see until much later.

I think more resources like seeing-theory would be great since stats books are almost universally dry (Blitzstein being a notable exception), but I'm not sure how easily more advanced concepts lend themselves to visual explanation in a way that's digestible for a non-stats person.

usernametaken29 17 hours ago | parent

I feel this boils down my learning journey as well. You start unraveling a very good intuition about the underlying concepts MUCH much later, but partly because those intuitions themselves are never conveyed and are supposed to be learned from the proofs, and are an indirect product of learning.

gus_massa 7 hours ago | parent

No idea about statistics, but in most physict courses in my university, they recomend 3 books:

1) The main book, that has a complete explanation and is well ordered. It's for learning.

2) Tha Landau book, that is super short and hard. It's only to check you didn't miss any important formula or topic.

3) There Feynman book, that is anassorted colection of fairytales for physicist. It's a pleasure to read it but you must already read 1 to understand it.

4) The Shaum book, that is almost a colection of exercices. Some people hate it. Some people love it. I like it as a companion to theother books.

I guess you are complaining that 1 is boring and want to write 3. It's a good idea, but it's harder than expected.

msla 1 hour ago | parent

Similar to an old idea I had about how every programming language needs three books:

1. Basic introduction.

2. Reference tome, which has absolutely everything.

3. Cookbook with style advice for the more advanced student, which assumes you've read 1 and can look up various details in 2.

These days, 2 would be a wiki and 1 would likely be a bunch of pages on that wiki, but it's still good if you have someone sit down and write 3.

gdulli 1 hour ago | parent

Probably.

pessimizer 1 hour ago | parent

Such a bizarre question. Many, many people have read statistics textbooks.

Can you write one that's more worth reading than the standard ones? Don't answer that question, just prove it.

RobGR 30 minutes ago | parent

I would at least investigate it. I have purchased and read statistics books recently. Mostly the old classics by R.A. Fisher and D.R. Cox and etc, I have a copy of Handbook 91 by Mary Natrella. My questions are pretty simple. I like the "worked examples" approach in Handbook 91.

bigdict 13 minutes ago | parent

I would! If you are thinking to write one, do it!

howunfortunate 10 minutes ago | parent

I'm a nerd and do a lot of stats for my job and I would not read a statistics textbook.

I read a lot of informational things, but math / stats / software has always felt like an area where a book is just the wrong format.

If I were you I'd make an interactive website like SQLZoo or a video series like StatQuest.

Those are educational formats that really clicked with me for whatever reason.

rootsudo 4 minutes ago | parent

Yes, I love it and would do so

junon 2 minutes ago | parent

Not sure I'd read it as-written. But I'd love a statistics book whereby the chapters are real case studies. I personally learn best when I can apply new theory to a tangible problem (not just an example problem that's been reduced to almost nothing).

However going the 'visual' route might be enough for me to pick it up.