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Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?

1 points by usernametaken29 ↗ HN
I had a classic Bayesian statistical education throughout my undergraduate and grad years and I’ve come to conclude that the plethora of books offered are pretty bad.

For me personally statistics is intuitive if illustrated properly. A great example is https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/

I was wondering whether it would make sense to turn the intuitions behind statistics into a book. Would anyone read it? Do people still read stats books or would it be mostly a waste of effort? If you wanted to teach/help people understand statistics, what resources would you consider?

69 comments

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aghuang
It depends on what parts of statistics is being taught and the application of each of the leanings and how it relates to the real world.

More generally, I would buy a statistics if it is linked to today's interesting technological breakthroughs and also if it comes as a distilled version for beginners.

mdspan
Having also studied statistics in university (undergrad), something I kept running into is that you can't really unlock the intuition for many concepts without taking more advanced courses. For example, degrees of freedom shows up as early as AP Statistics, but even a non-rigorous visual explanation of it leans on linear algebra, which most students don't see until much later.

I think more resources like seeing-theory would be great since stats books are almost universally dry (Blitzstein being a notable exception), but I'm not sure how easily more advanced concepts lend themselves to visual explanation in a way that's digestible for a non-stats person.

usernametaken29
I feel this boils down my learning journey as well. You start unraveling a very good intuition about the underlying concepts MUCH much later, but partly because those intuitions themselves are never conveyed and are supposed to be learned from the proofs, and are an indirect product of learning.
gus_massa
No idea about statistics, but in most physict courses in my university, they recomend 3 books:

1) The main book, that has a complete explanation and is well ordered. It's for learning.

2) Tha Landau book, that is super short and hard. It's only to check you didn't miss any important formula or topic.

3) There Feynman book, that is anassorted colection of fairytales for physicist. It's a pleasure to read it but you must already read 1 to understand it.

4) The Shaum book, that is almost a colection of exercices. Some people hate it. Some people love it. I like it as a companion to theother books.

I guess you are complaining that 1 is boring and want to write 3. It's a good idea, but it's harder than expected.

msla
Similar to an old idea I had about how every programming language needs three books:

1. Basic introduction.

2. Reference tome, which has absolutely everything.

3. Cookbook with style advice for the more advanced student, which assumes you've read 1 and can look up various details in 2.

These days, 2 would be a wiki and 1 would likely be a bunch of pages on that wiki, but it's still good if you have someone sit down and write 3.

throwaway81523
Back in my day, the 3 books for programmers were Knuth vol 1, Knuth vol 2, and Knuth vol 3. ;)
lukasbm
Most german speakers will look back at the 2000 pages of "Java ist auch eine Insel" in terror, but it was actually all three books in one.
WCSTombs
I think you're describing the the Diátaxis framework [1], which would further split your (1) into fully guided tutorials and discursive explanations.

[1]: https://diataxis.fr/

pessimizer
Such a bizarre question. Many, many people have read statistics textbooks.

Can you write one that's more worth reading than the standard ones? Don't answer that question, just prove it.

RobGR
I would at least investigate it. I have purchased and read statistics books recently. Mostly the old classics by R.A. Fisher and D.R. Cox and etc, I have a copy of Handbook 91 by Mary Natrella. My questions are pretty simple. I like the "worked examples" approach in Handbook 91.
bigdict
I would! If you are thinking to write one, do it!
howunfortunate
I'm a nerd and do a lot of stats for my job and I would not read a statistics textbook.

I read a lot of informational things, but math / stats / software has always felt like an area where a book is just the wrong format.

If I were you I'd make an interactive website like SQLZoo or a video series like StatQuest.

Those are educational formats that really clicked with me for whatever reason.

rootsudo
Yes, I love it and would do so
junon
Not sure I'd read it as-written. But I'd love a statistics book whereby the chapters are real case studies. I personally learn best when I can apply new theory to a tangible problem (not just an example problem that's been reduced to almost nothing).

However going the 'visual' route might be enough for me to pick it up.

philosopherNoob
Yes, with the caveat that someone else with knowledge in the field has to recommend it to me. Partner up with someone who teaches statistics.
ssivark
[delayed]
eru
How do you make 'reasonable judgements'? How do you tell whether someone else made reasonable judgements? How do you judge other people's intuition?

Modelling distributions explicitly sounds nice, yes.

ssivark
[delayed]
stackghost
>Look at the histogram and think about what distribution one could reasonably impute from samples. And what you would set as bounds for "outliers", per your needs. While we're at it, let me also say that it might be useful to specify outlier bounds not just based on the spread in sample values, but the costs/payoffs they imply for your application.

Only people with prior education/training in statistics are capable of doing this. The people who don't need a textbook.

Something like 60% of US adults read at or below the 6th grade level, and 25% of US adults struggle to comprehend graphs or charts entirely. Someone who has no idea what a standard deviation is can't intuit about distributions. I think you're dramatically overestimating the average person.

jbs789
Yup. And thinking through the physical realities or whatever real world constraints exist.
discardable_dan
My larger issue, any time I have tried to learn statistics, is how fast the notation moves. You end up flipping back pages and pages just to double-check a definition that was given once and is now being extended syntactically. It's infuriating.
rramadass
Yes, there is always a need for another "intuitive statistics" book.

However the link you have provided is not the way; it is low on content and high on pretty distractions. Use all sorts of diagrams and graphs primarily, with animations only where required. The key is to always relate to something in the real world so one can see its actual relevance. Also tie it back to other fields of mathematics so one can see how they all come together.

A good example to study is How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas Hubbard. Detailed review at - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybYBCK9D7MZCcdArB/how-to-mea...

aspectmin
I’m weird. I read textbooks and instruction manuals. I read incredibly fast though, so it fits nicely. There’s always some deeper learning to be gained in those pages.

Good luck if you do this.

montalbano
How would it overlap or differ from 'Statistical Rethinking'?

This is widely regarded as the most accessible intro textbook to Bayesian statistics.

https://xcelab.net/rm/

stdbrouw
+ Krushke’s Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, and for the very basics there is Downey’s Think Bayes. I guess there might be a gap in the literature for a different approach, heck, I’d read it, but there is some very good material already out there.
geokon
Maybe my expectations were too high given all the online praise, but I've been working through it for the past two weeks and I've been disappointed:

- The language is often very vague and imprecise.

- Concepts are introduced at random and then not used till much later. So as you're reading you're left scratching your head as to why something was brought up.

- There are constant philosophical and historical digressions that maybe only hold some deeper meaning on a second reading once you already know the topic.

- Constant references to other people, like some guy Fisher, who don't like the method presented. This is discussed at length and they keep combing back to this theme (they seem really butthurt about this?). But the craziest part is this all done before you even really understand what the method is!!

- The editor must have places some strict requirement of saying "Baysian" at least five times per page.

- No index. Useless table of context. Lots of endnotes you feel compelled to flip to constantly

Overall it feels like a textbook written to impress other statistics professors.

The overall structure and objectives seem solid for the most part. It's just a lot of the details aren't great. The examples are fun and compelling, but you have to do your own legwork to actually pick through all the prose and tie the pieces together to figure how it fits together mathematically. Fortunately AI helps as a tutor

stdbrouw
Rethinking is indeed written for people who have some or even a lot of existing proficiency in statistics, but for whom it never really clicked. If that’s not your background, I can understand that it might feel disjointed.
geokon
I appreciate the sanity check :) I'm still enjoying studying the subject
throwaway81523
Aren't a zillion statistics books out there already? Yes I've been wanting to read one, and Wikipedia also has lots of good statistics articles. I've been wanting to work through Freedman and Pisani's book but you know how it goes. It's supposed to be excellent.
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whattheheckheck
Yes foundations of agnostic statistics and all of statistics
ludicrousdispla
I took my first statistics class as an evening course, before going to graduate school, and 90% of the work involved doing hand calculations, avg., variance, std. dev., z-scores, t-tests, etc. And I think that gave me a strong grasp of those fundamentals.

If you could do something similar for bayesian statistics I think that would be useful, but not necessarily popular.

jadermcs
Definitely there’s an interest for visual pedagogical content. However a book nowadays may not be the most effective way to reach a wider audience, instead of a video or an interactive website. I guess that combining these other media may help you reach more people to get interested in the book.

Another exemple of a successful visual pedagogical content is: https://www.byhand.ai/

thastings
Even if I would not read it back to back on release, it would be a pleasure to have a reliable and citable reference on hand. Whenever I stumble upon new complex problems, outside of the regular, often fairly repetitive statistical questions of my field, I need to rely on many searches and LLM queries to find my answer. I wonder if a book could actually replace all that, but it would be my first place to check.
clutter55561
Yes, I’d read it.

But beware of opinions.

Don’t let people put you down, especially here in HN, where people are perceived to smart. Smart doesn’t equal sensible or unbiased.

Many books are written to scratch the itch of the author. Just like an open source project. It is a work of love.