Ryan Peterman

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?

And they're like, you're like, let's really dig into the proof.

And they're like, fine.

You know, one of their four people I love, love, love, love more than anybody is Larry Wasserman.

I've never met a guy, so I don't know what he's like as a human, but like his books are like to me the embodiment of like hyper intense honesty.

It just seems like a person just like, I cannot tell a lie.

And just like, therefore, like everything you get from Wasserman is exactly true.

Like he tells you exactly what he's assuming.

He tells you exactly what's implied.

And he's also extremely clear about being like, I actually don't claim these other things that you might want me to claim because they're not true.

And I think a ton of statistics books are not like that.

A ton of statistics books are like, user methods, they're great.

And so I think Wasserman is really at the top.

Another book that someone recommended to me sort of halfway through my career, a meta that I loved, I think it's called something like Introduction to Agnostic Statistics, is a book by a guy named Peter Aronow.

And he's, I think, another person like this, sort of just like incredibly concerned with whether the things he says are true or false.

And he's hyper rigorous and hyper careful.

And again, I think a lot of people in statistics are not hyper rigorous and hyper careful.