Quack
Statistics
Click to enlarge (73K)
Jan 2002
I made this one after I took a statistics class from the famous Stan Glantz at UCSF. He was very funny and an excellent teacher, and by the time I was done statistics seemed very systematic and clear. Then a took a class by another smart guy, Dr. Charles McCollough, who pointed out all the other opinions about the statistical approach of Dr. Glantz. It was then that I realized that statistics wasn't the indisputable mathematics that I was used to but largely a matter of opinion that uses math to lull its users into a sense of truth. Thus, this cartoon.
The Synapse actually got some feedback on this one. Someone wrote in and said that the father of statistics was Mathematics, not Bullsh**, and implied that statistics had some weird Oedipal longing for Science. Too weird for me. Maybe.