[jlgray]

To quote wikipedia's article on statistics: Statistics is the study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data.

Isn't that more or less what human brains do?

A neural network is just a curve fitting algorithm optimized to fit a bunch of data, that is, a statistical method. NNs are, to the best of my knowledge, a fairly good analogy for what the physical computation process of the brain.

NNs are also very easy to fool. Mislabel the humans in your robot training data as 'kill', and your network will make bad decisions. Garbage in, garbage out.

If you make a probabilistic model and attach a very high confidence to the things that spirits tell little girls down by the river, then sometimes your model will suggest some terrible ideas. Humans are also notoriously bad at sampling data, but that doesn't mean it isn't what they're doing.

Your edit raises a good question, though! I can't say I have a good answer, but would be interested to hear a good idea for such an experiment.

I want to use the phenomenon the inner monologue and the act of convincing oneself of something as a counter example, but on the other hand, language is very easily generated by statistical methods, and the brain apparently will make decisions and then come up with justifications afterward. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/04/27/095679761664...

[twinkletwinkle]

>Isn't that more or less what human brains do?

Sure but now what are you demonstrating. "The human brain collects and interprets data". Great paper, thanks for the contribution to science.

[webaba]

Love it

[haberman]

> Statistics is the study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data. Isn't that more or less what human brains do?

I think you have expanded the meaning of statistics beyond what is understood in the article. The originally understood meaning is "numerically/theoretically justifiable inferences given a set of input data." Now you're taking it to mean "any data-processing pipeline."

By this large and more abstract definition, here are some more things that are based on statistics:

    - tabloid newspapers
    - religious sermons
    - sundials
    - televisions

[mitchtbaum]

"Statistics", like "Science", is only a name which came much later than each field's and approach's discovery, use, and study that its followers want to believe make it up, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_probability_and_st...

If you want to see which institutions they serve, you can look deeper into etymology and environments where they emerged.