The learning mind is such an amazing thing. Or maybe it’s better to consider it a process for the purpose of this musing. Let’s say hypothetically that I have a research internship, for which I will eventually be called on to help analyze and interpret relatively complex psychometric data. I don’t have any formal experience in statistics, but I have been periodically looking up statistics videos on Youtube and watching various 5-minute clips so that I can get a very basic sense of how statistics works and what I need to learn.
I use osmosis as a strategy to learn the basics of any discipline. There are some advantages to being a complete beginner in a topic. Let’s say I want to understand the basics of statistics, which I do. I look up a video where I find a person explaining a concept in statistics. I watch it. Note, I don’t actually care about the concept they are explaining. I similarly don’t care whether the person is correct or giving me misleading information about this concept. I don’t have a fully-formed enough knowledge about statistics for minor details like that to matter.
But despite not caring about the concept, not planning on learning or understanding it, and not caring about accuracy, it feels like the video is offering me some sort of benefit. What is that? Watching the video, and engaging in the hopeless task of trying to understand what the speaker is saying, pulls at my mind in a way. While I can’t hope to understand what the speaker is talking about, I do still recognize the syntactical words of their sentences, and these guide me through the logical flow of the explanation. I’m being led on a tour of a museum blindfolded: I can’t see the statues and paintings the guide is pointing to, but I can hear them. I’m not familiar with the names or historical events they allude to, but I can tell that they’re alluding. I can tell that they’re using the word “varimax” as a noun, and based on context I can tell that it represents an action or technique. I can tell that there’s something important about “loading factors”, although it never seems to reach the newspapers (so I also know it can’t be related to political scandals). And there’s something good about maximizing variances. At a more general level, I observe that a lot of statistics activity seems to revolve around taking pieces of information, which seem to have an optimal way of fitting together (although this may or may not be found) and learning various mathematical approaches to combining them into useful generalities. (This sounds like a simple definition of statistics, but would you be able to pull that out of a hat, being unfamiliar with the discipline? I contend it’s useful.)
I still have not learned one iota of factual information about statistics. But having been led on my blind tour, I’ve familiarized a great deal with the terrain – the structure of reasoning used – and when I go to start learning some factual information, I will already have useful conceptual schemas established, rather than having to make them up on the spot – allowing me to put the facts in place more quickly and more painlessly.
Advertisement
