As I think I’ve mentioned here before, my partner is taking a biostatistics course and thereby reminding me of how much I loved this stuff. And I’m reminded of the Galton quote about the Central Limit Theorem:

> I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the “Law of Frequency of Error.” The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand and marshalled in order of their magnitude, an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along.

It’s not only beautiful, but it’s obviously extremely useful. Yet, given how often I’ve failed to explain how a random sample of a couple thousand people can adequately capture the political views of a nation of 318 million, clearly there’s something mysterious and objectionable about it. For that matter, given how many people took umbrage at Nate Silver’s election forecasts, even though basically all he did was average poll data, it seems like this antipathy to statistics is pretty widespread; statistical laws explain exactly where, and under what conditions, you’d expect individual chaos to yield collective order, yet people really seem to recoil from the thought that their collective actions might be rule-governed.

It really does often feel like I’m possession of a kind of occult knowledge that everyone could learn but few choose to. And I’m nowhere near the level of statistical knowledge that I want to attain. Even just the bit of probability and statistics that I know is enough to resolve a lot of mental muddle.