[ivansavz]

Statistics.

I started (re)learning this subject in preparation for a new book, thinking all I had to do was review what I studied in my university days, and summarize the essential ideas, but it turns out statistics is A LOT more complicated than that. It's like a black hole that you can never get out of. There is lots of historical baggage, strong opinions, unjustified rules of thumb, etc. I've been in it for 5+ years now! As a physicist, I want to understand how things work under the hood, so I can explain to readers the underlying mechanisms and not just give formulas without explanations, and this has been very hard to do. The whole thing is well summarized by this quote from Richard McElreath "Statistics is a horrible thing."

There is hope though, in recent years teaching frequentist statistics is moving toward simulation based methods, a.k.a. the modern statistics curriculum, which makes a lot of sense. Here is a blog post about that: https://minireference.com/blog/fixing-the-statistics-curricu...

You can see the notebooks from the upcoming book here: https://nobsstats.com/ and concept map here: https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSstats/conceptm...