It Isn’t Really about Math
I don’t like math. There, I said it. Or, at least, I used to not like math. My Bachelor’s Degree was in philosophy, which I picked partly because math scared me away from “more scientific” fields. I took my first statistics course when I was 30 years old, as part of the remedial courses I had to take in order to become a graduate student in sociology. In addition to the well-known struggles of being a “nontraditional” student with a full-time job, I was taking statistics after more than a decade without a single math course.
Students in the sciences, undergraduate and graduate alike, often dread taking statistics. People are comforted by numbers—especially a stubbornly practical people like U.S.-Americans—it gives a sense of order, of certainty. People want to trust numbers, but also fear numbers, and this leads to all kinds of flawed conclusions when statistics are misused or misinterpreted. But hey—if you loved math, you’d become a mathematician, or a theoretical physicist, right?
As many people reading this are probably aware, math is one of those things that, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.” This isn’t so much because we’re “good” or “bad” at math; math is objectively hard. Practice or forget—those are the rules. Though this is true of statistics—it takes practice, and often means thinking in ways that are unfamiliar or not very intuitive—the good news is that statistics isn’t really about math.
Think of this more like a blog or diary than a book, with the goal of passing on my passion for statistics (my wife makes fun of me for saying that) to any and all who are interested. Each part is its own lesson, and each part builds on the last part. Each lesson can be thought of as passing on a word, symbol, or concept, a part of the language of social statistics. I keep saying “social statistics” to make clear that I’m not doing math first and foremost here, but something more like teaching a new language, an applied language to help make sense of the complexities of the social world. Statistics, despite a reputation for being complicated, is about simplifying the world. And statistics, despite having a reputation for bringing certainty and order to the world, is like any other powerful tool—it takes training and care to use them wisely; they can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I am not exaggerating when I say that misusing statistics gets people killed—a tragic lesson that has really hit home over the last couple of years.
There are many tools to bring to bear to counteract these dangers. First and foremost, democratizing statistics, challenging the idea that statistics are almost mystical in their power and authority. Instead, statistics should be thought of as a tool that, like any other, anyone can learn to use with the right training. At the end of each entry, there are exercises, opportunities to test yourself—in that sense, learning statistics is like working out (something else I really enjoy): the more you push yourself, the stronger and more well-rounded your statistical proficiency will become. In some sections I’ll include ways to use widely used and relatively user-friendly software (particularly Excel and SPSS). Not only does being literate in these software programs make for great resume material in an age define by computer technologies, but it also makes the mathematical work, where there is some math to be done, simpler and more accurate than calculating by hand. I’d also recommend having a basic calculator on hand—nothing fancy, just something that can do basic arithmetic functions and the square root function.
I am passionate (there’s that word again) about bringing statistical literacy, the ability to read and converse in the language of social statistics, out of the textbooks and the “Ivory Tower” and into the broader world. Hope you enjoy, and if you don’t find a passion for statistics, I am confident these readings will at least empower you in a world in which statistics have become an ever more important tool, and in which the temptation to misuse statistics has perhaps never been greater.
