Statistics Of Life !!

You never know when and where you will life teach you the its lessons in the most subtle ways. One of the lessons I learnt in the initial days was in basic Stats class @ ISB was - Consistency is not Always a virtue !! How true. Though weve been trained to be consistent and always strive for the best it might not be required all the time and more importantly not possible all the time. Though the stats lesson talked about variance and deviation, it has had implications in the way I see things in life. And so the basics dawned on me again ....Relax when you can and stretch when required. Common sense isnt it ?



Term 1 and came Watermans classes..... one of the best profs. SO while he was teaching multiple regression which I think cudnt have been taught any better, he said .... Never ignore an outlier, otherwise you will never learn beyond what you already know. Such a powerful statement.
To learn new things in life we have to be able to look beyond what seems acceptable.
But do we do that?? Most of the time we excuse ourselves by saying "there are always a few exceptions" The actual wisdom though, lies not in ignoring or accounting for an exception all the time, but indeed in being able to rationalize whether the exception needs our attention or not.



Another one on the same lines... Courtesy Prof Ziv Katalan. ..Class 1 Decision Models and Optimization, Monte Carlo Simulation.
He says -
We know that we dont know, but we ignore the ignorance !!!!
Can it get better than this :)
And we learn to Acknowledge Uncertainity :)