Go to bed with a statistician? Or watch drying paint?

Author: Julian Champkin

George Box, an eminent statistician.

Image by DavidMCEddy/Wikimedia.

What is a statistician really like? A BBC Radio 4 programme has tried to find out. Are they vague, unworldly chaps who have brains the size of a planet but who can’t quite tie their own shoelaces? Are they less socially adept even than mathematicians? Are they thugs from the backstreets who will lightly mug you with a non-parametric hierarchical Bayesian model before telling you that your last three inferences were unjustifiable and insignificant? Is their conversation such that you would rather watch paint dry, or are they charming, handsome, intelligent, witty and beautiful people at the first sight of whom you would actually want to jump straight into bed with them for a passionate and mutual weekend-long investigation of well-distributed curves?

There are some of all of those in the ranks of statisticians - if you don’t believe the last one, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian did famously describe statistics as the ‘sexy profession’ of the decade. But what is the shared passion that drives all these disparate and various people?

Find out, straight from the statistician’s mouths here (for UK users only) where interviewer Peter Curran drops in the Royal Statistical Society’s annual awards party to investigate The Tribes of Science – the Statisticians. Hear top statisticians - they are the charming, handsome, intelligent, witty and beautiful ones - including Sheila Bird, David Spiegelhalter, David Hand and Valerie Isham describing what really floats their boats, why they chose statistics when any other discipline was wide open to them – and why statisticians are so hugely important and, occasionally, so incredibly annoying. Two quotes at random:
‘I care more about truth than other things. Of course we never know the truth…’ ‘The big problem about statisticians is that they qualify everything so much that most people haven’t the foggiest idea what they are talking about.’

Why do otherwise sensible people do statistics? This will tell you.