Ryan Peterman

But in reality, what they do is do pure mathematics and study how statistical methods work in an idealized theoretical world.

And in pure math, as an undergrad, I did pure math, and I loved things like number theory.

In pure math, you're just period.

It's pure.

You prove it.

It's internally coherent.

There's no attempt to reconcile with reality.

Reality doesn't even matter.

You're just like, there's rules.

We follow the rules.

We're in this internally consistent system.

And then in super applied fields like software engineering, you're just like, well, the thing runs.

The code runs.

I don't know what to tell you.

I can't prove this code runs, but we ran it in broad and it had eight nines of reliability, which makes it better than most of the software.

Everything but humans were good.

Statistics is the super crazy field where you reason in and out mathematics, but then make all these claims about how it's going to be useful to people in practice.

And this, I think, is where opinions come in so strongly is that I think some people just like are very, very honest and hold themselves to a super high bar.

And some people are super cavalier about stuff and are roughly just like, well, I said it's true.

And then you're like, well, is it true?