I did business programming for a living at a specialty retailer. I encountered users over and over again who believed implicitly in numbers. E. g. inventory. There’s a single digit probability that any given inventory number is not correct. Usually it doesn’t matter much except when the quantity is low. I kept saying things like, humans are doing the counting. Then there were the ones who were uneasy about the precision. I’d ask them, “Is this what you need to make a decision?”
A lot of people don’t know that modern statistics came from Gauss’s analysis of astronomical observation errors. He was asked to develop a method to deal with them. Smart guy, Gauss. He did plenty more before and after discovering the bell curve.
I did business programming for a living at a specialty retailer. I encountered users over and over again who believed implicitly in numbers. E. g. inventory. There’s a single digit probability that any given inventory number is not correct. Usually it doesn’t matter much except when the quantity is low. I kept saying things like, humans are doing the counting. Then there were the ones who were uneasy about the precision. I’d ask them, “Is this what you need to make a decision?”
A lot of people don’t know that modern statistics came from Gauss’s analysis of astronomical observation errors. He was asked to develop a method to deal with them. Smart guy, Gauss. He did plenty more before and after discovering the bell curve.