Ryan Peterman

I love statistics.

I think I'll never not love it, but I think it's the craziest field.

And what I mean by crazy is...

It's a field that fundamentally sells people the idea that they can use statistical methods in real life.

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.