[ocular-rockular]

As an introduction to the topic it functions very well though. It doesn't matter whether it's valid or not. In fact, I would say that diving immediately into the validity of some bullshit independence assumptions and other nonsense is where you lose most students (it definitely lost me).

I think flawed examples lead to a great way of scaffolding towards the "true" nontrivial answer in a teaching setting at least... I am still exceptionally bitter at how I was taught and forced to learn stochastics and it was very much through a purely theoretical, proof driven, abstract lens with very crappy examples that were more of an afterthought... because of course the theory is all you need to make sense of it!

[2-3-7-43-1807]

This bullshit independence is one of the most fundamental and important concepts of probability theory and that other nonsense is also relevant cause especially with statistics it's easy to concoct a model which only seems to be correct ... but in fact isn't.

[ocular-rockular]

Exactly my point, hence why at least from the learning side it works well towards making something that is actually correct. What I was aiming at is that too often people teaching this stuff get lost in the weeds without any clear motivation for what is actually being taught.