Comments on: British and French statisticians disagree!

By: Melina

Melina — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:15:08 +0000

very interesting. i’m adding in RSS Reader

By: Tony

Tony — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 15:12:52 +0000

Hi Ross. That’s interesting because statistics can be viewed in an operational sense, as you describe, when it is a “doing”, and it can also be viewed in a representational sense, in that it’s about other things in the world, when it is a “knowing”. These are just two views of the same thing, although the second is the level a statistician is usually interested in (ie answering questions about things). It’s clear that the use of statistics is dependent on operation, from the first view. However, the second view works at a more abstract level, and perhaps it is this that makes it seem as though statistics is an objective method (ie divorced from the pragmatic issues). The operational view reminds us that this cannot be the case and that any information provided by statistics, on the second view, is only meaningful with respect to the problem we are addressing.

By: Ross Gayler

Ross Gayler — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 23:55:30 +0000

The line I take on this is that “meaning” is about potential sensorimotor interactions with the world (along the lines of affordances or Predictive State Representations). A statistical result is too disembodied (in general) to have a meaning. It can only have a meaning by virtue of plugging it into a potential sensorimotor interaction. The statistic does not determine the sensorimotor interaction and some combinations would be incompatible. So, I would rephrase what you and David said as: first choose the operational meaning that is of interest to you and then choose the statistic to suit. In the car example, the meaning (and appropriate statistic) would differ depending on whether you are managing a fleet of cars and care about the total consumption or are a purchaser interested in buying a single car picked at random from the population of Rovers or Renaults.