frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?

59•usernametaken29•1d ago
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?

Comments

aghuang•1d ago
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.

Eridanus2•1d ago
https://stewartschultz.com/statistics/books/Statistics_Terri...
mdspan•1d ago
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•19h ago
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•9h ago
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•3h ago
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•1h ago
Back in my day, the 3 books for programmers were Knuth vol 1, Knuth vol 2, and Knuth vol 3. ;)
gdulli•3h ago
Probably.
pessimizer•3h ago
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•2h ago
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•2h ago
I would! If you are thinking to write one, do it!
howunfortunate•2h ago
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•2h ago
Yes, I love it and would do so
junon•1h ago
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•1h ago
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•1h ago
My personal opinion is that statistics textbooks usually come from a prescriptive perspective, and that makes it challenging for the reader to get visceral intuition for what is actually going on. Any reader would be far better off just visualizing the damn distribution / samples and using reasonable judgement, instead of implicitly assuming a Gaussians distribution and blindly memorizing tests / formulae. Making the distributions explicit allows us to model them and get an intuition for what the samples are telling us. I would whole-heartedly recommend the Model based machine learning book to anyone (online version is free) https://mbmlbook.com/
eru•28m ago
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.

rramadass•1h ago
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...

And of course Nassim Taleb's works are a good source of inspiration. Here is a great video summarizing Taleb's ideas nicely Pareto, Power Laws, and Fat Tails - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcqt49dXtm8

aspectmin•1h ago
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•1h ago
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/

throwaway81523•58m ago
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.
whattheheckheck•51m ago
Yes foundations of agnostic statistics and all of statistics
ludicrousdispla•33m ago
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.

hollowturtle•26m ago
I would read it
jadermcs•19m ago
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•15m ago
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•2m ago
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.

Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

79•imadtaieber•11h ago•63 comments

Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

99•jmpman•1d ago•55 comments

Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?

59•usernametaken29•1d ago•27 comments

Ask HN: Show your micro-SaaS

11•genekrapivin•10h ago•3 comments

Tell HN: Anthropic should make Claude the Author and me the Co-Author

4•xeonax•2h ago•3 comments

Ask HN: UK Rescue Rocket Sheds/Houses Information

22•burnt-resistor•11h ago•6 comments

Ask HN: Looking for an old submission about sneering culture

3•annex-winged-cr•3h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Connecting Kubernetes dependencies to application telemetry

4•chipfixer•14h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What are other "uncrackable benchmarks"?

3•Nail2680•4h ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Any Software Engineers here who enjoy their AI-native dev workflow?

5•pkos98•17h ago•5 comments

Ask HN: (Why) Was the LLM breakthrough useful for images, audio, etc.?

3•rogerrogerr•14h ago•2 comments

Ask HN: Perplexity Pro vs. Claude – what are you paying for?

2•daytonflyers•5h ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?

190•sukit•3d ago•196 comments

Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?

271•tosmatos•4d ago•164 comments

Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

402•halcdev•3d ago•703 comments

Ask HN: How safe are our password managers in face of LLM cyber attacks?

3•muddi900•13h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What is your biggest struggle while learning?

2•Cursed666•7h ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Why don't we bring back old school OkCupid?

34•firefax•1d ago•58 comments

Ask HN: What are you working on?

5•meerita•13h ago•8 comments

Tell HN: I want to see the same moon as you

15•UnderABlueMoon•2d ago•13 comments

Ask HN: Model sycophancy benchmarks?

4•gradus_ad•13h ago•2 comments

Tell HN: Both recent GCP outages caused by fiber optic maintenance

19•fastest963•3d ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Are we normalizing surveillance in the name of safety?

3•dennysora-main•18h ago•2 comments

Astra still fails at creating acceptable Rotational Ambigram

3•das_vicky•19h ago•3 comments

Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?

71•Animats•3d ago•24 comments

Ask HN: 30, burnt out, with 6-10 months of runway. What would you do?

31•throwaway_30yo•4d ago•26 comments

Ask HN: Do you route only certain websites through a VPN?

2•dennysora-main•1d ago•4 comments

APAC Alpha – Zero-lag Intel terminal for Asian markets

2•apacalpha•1d ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What's the best place to learn about skills and AI for coding in general

4•rrmdp•11h ago•4 comments

Ask HN: Any Alternatives to Archive.ph & co?

7•hebelehubele•1d ago•4 comments