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by thousandautumns 2607 days ago
God I hate this paper. Perhaps it was relevant at its time. But that was 18 years ago. The described dichotomy between the "two cultures" isn't nearly as pronounced, if it even exists, today. There are few statisticians today who adhere entirely to the "data modeling culture" as described by Breiman.

I'm surprised how often this paper continues to get trotted out. In my experience it seems to be a favorite of non-statisticians who use it as evidence that statistics is a dying dinosaur of a field to be superseded by X (usually machine learning). Perhaps they think if its repeated enough it will be spoken into existence?