Why Programmers Need To Learn Statistics

David Gerard writes "Zed Shaw writes an impassioned plea to programmers: Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All. Quoting: 'I go insane when I hear programmers talking about statistics like they know s*** when it's clearly obvious they do not. I've been studying it for years and years and still don't think I know anything. ... I have taken a bunch of math classes, studied statistics in grad school, learned the R language, and read tons of books on the subject. Despite all of this I'm not at all confident in my understanding of such a vast topic. What I can do is apply the techniques to common problems I encounter at work. My favorite problem to attack with the statistics wolverine is performance measurement and tuning. All of this leads to a curse since none of my colleagues have any clue about what they don't understand. I'll propose a measurement technique and they'll scoff at it. I try to show them how to properly graph a run chart and they're indignant. I question their metrics and they try to back it up with lame attempts at statistical reasoning. I really can't blame them since they were probably told in college that logic and reason are superior to evidence and observation.'"pa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/01/09/2154224/Why-Programmers-Need-To-Learn-Statistics?from=rss"img src="http://developers.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/01/09/2154224"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/01/09/2154224/Why-Programmers-Need-To-Learn-Statistics?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-8LtkthKhcZ1UVwsDK6gMQP2F-k/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-8LtkthKhcZ1UVwsDK6gMQP2F-k/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-8LtkthKhcZ1UVwsDK6gMQP2F-k/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-8LtkthKhcZ1UVwsDK6gMQP2F-k/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/ZbzQqnP44cg" height="1" width="1"/

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