this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
345 points (99.4% liked)

Science Memes

11431 readers
999 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
345
Pick some unrelated lectures, they said. (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It will widen your horizon, they said. And here I was, foolishly thinking I could get away with half-assing statistics during my degree.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (4 children)

My wife did more statistics in her psychology degree than I did in engineering.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Engineering formulas be like

"So there was this guy in 1896 and he did a bunch of trials and he figured out that a+b*x/c² is close enough to the real results, with values for a in range 1-2 and b in range 3-4. We still don't understand why, or how he got there, but it worked ever since."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Scientists want to understand things. Engineers don't care, as long as it works.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

"More recent research has produced a more precise emperical relation, -4.2x^3.761+√(sin(2x²/π))±erf(e²ˣ+37), which produces results which are 0.2% more accurate on average."

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Because engineering is precise, measurable, and easily reproducible. You should be testing your things in a way that all you need is a simple two-sample Z-test.

Experiments on the humans, on the hand, unfortunately, have been outlawed. So all you get is a bunch of shitty noisy data, and yet you're supposed to somehow make sense of it. Most people with a degree in stats would tell you not to even try, and yet those fucks at phycology departments always do while having had about one undergrad-level class as part of their masters.

TL;DR good psychology programs nowdays train decent statisticians as they should.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

It always got me that the maths I was doing in electrical engineering outclassed what my friend was doing for his astrophysics degree. He was probably at the better university too (Debatable for the subjects in question, but both really good).

Did I need that level of maths? No, but it was compulsory for the first 3 years so not much option.