The Hanover Collaboration

As one who is nearing the end of their graduate studies (the defense is being scheduled, the dissertation is basically written, etc.) I find myself spending a lot of time ruminating on just what a horrible experience it has been. (Don’t pity me; I am solely to blame.)

One aspect of this regular cogitation is focused on the fact that PhD suffering, (which comes in many forms and can be experienced differently by different people, so YMMV) is very difficult to relate to others.

Some well known attempts can be found at PhDComics. Indeed, some of their most popular comics are attempts at capturing the desperate ennui of grad school: see here, here, here, here and here. These are pretty good, although I usually regard PhDComics as a fairly bland and predictable form of humor. They usually evoke not much more than a grunt of familiarity from me.

However, the brilliant musings of Scott Eric Kaufman at Acephalous are pure genius. If you are not already reading his blog, go there now. He’s a humanities guy (literary theory and rhetoric in visual media I think) so I frequently don’t follow the academic stuff. But the guy is the only person I know who could give Cosmo a run for his money as the Toughest Writer Alive. The guy can write.

And he has written depictions of life as a PhD student that, while topically distinct from my own experiences (statistics), honestly feel like he has been secretly videotaping my life. And what a sad, depressing life it has been for the last few years. Don’t believe me? Read these four posts in order. Now read this.

Done? Good. Now do you see? Do you? The horror! The horror!

I don’t mean to belabor this topic, so this will be my last post on the subject. Jon pointed to this and it’s a great example of what I was complaining about before.

Namely, it’s Nate Silver leveraging his (inflated) reputation as a Statistical Prediction God to do things (presumably for money) that may be fun for geeky types (myself included) but that do not represent a particularly responsible presentation of the usefulness of statistics to the general public.

Statistics is changing. All fields of knowledge change, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Statistics has been changing quicker than usual over the past two decades or so.

I think that it is becoming much harder to justify including statistics as a discipline within the field of mathematics. (Others, much more learned than I, have made similar observations .)

Lately, statisticians have become too wrapped up in their identity as mathematicians. This has meant that much of the really exciting work with data being done today is being done by people with CS backgrounds. It’s pretty depressing to read a lot of statistics journals these days. It seems like much of the work being done is filling in theoretical gaps that have relatively little impact on real world data analysis. Many of the details being investigated mathematically assume that a stochastic model is right, and then try to make the estimators better. But I seriously doubt that the biggest limitation of multiple regression analysis in social sciences is really the relative efficiency of one estimator over another. (I’m generalizing; not all research is like this, obviously.)

What makes this worse is that the actual math underlying statistics (beyond the very basics) is just plain boring. There’s a reason that statistics papers put their proofs in the appendix: they aren’t needed to understand the result!

I’m certain that Megan McArdle is, in my opinion, far and away the most infuriating blogger in existence.

And yet I’m oddly fascinated by her commentary, which means that I keep checking her blog and watching her on bloggingheads.tv. I’m beginning to feel as though reading her blog is my own version of the book.

Please. Put me out of my misery. Enlighten me! Why am I so powerfully drawn to this train wreck of a blogger like a moth to a flame?

PS – Man, that last sentence sucked. It must be McArdle’s fault.

Being atheist, nihilistic and all that, kinda puts a person on bad footing in terms of holidays. They’re all sort of arbitrary. Like the whole calendar. Random month length is really stupid, just like putting the leap day not at the end of the year. I know, December already has 31 days and February was made the bitch of a couple too many Roman emperors. At this point in human history, changing the calendar to something sensible would be harder than convincing the United States to switch to metric.