Bababa ba?

I was looking through my old Stat notes in hopes of finding some probability stuff that might help me in my 3rd Mathematical Physics course when I ended up in page 203 of Ma’am Almeda’s 114 course notes. It was one of those jokes in the “Fun With Stat” sections of the said text (I guess it’s to somewhat cheer Stat majors up in their hard but very bright road to becoming future statisticians).

Anyways, here’s how the joke goes:

What’s the difference between a physicist, a mathematician, and a statistician?

The physicist calculates until he gets a correct result and concludes that he has proven a fact.

The mathematician calculates until he gets a wrong result and concludes that he has proven the contrary of a fact.

The statistician calculates until he gets a correct result about an obviously wrong proposition and concludes NOTHING, because the explanation is the task of the scientist who consulted the statistician

I know I’d be bringing up again an old old issue and long long story of why I left the BS Statistics curriculum for the BS Applied Physics curriculum. But I never get tired of explaining to people why.

So, again, why? Why did I leave an already possible lucrative future with a surely stable career? (not that I am saying being a Physicist is not lucrative though).

Because I wanted more.

I didn’t want to be just the one analyzing the data for someone who asked me to. I didn’t want to end there.

I wanted to be the one who looked for the data, the one who analyzed the data, the one who interpreted the data, the one who shared the data, and the one who applied the data.

I wanted to question, I wanted to discover, I wanted to learn.

I wanted to be a scientist.

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So what happens when the statistician gets a correct result for an obviously wrong proposition?

For the scientist, things don’t end there.

That’s where he begins.