From an old Language Log post about
misunderstanding of the concept 'long tail' (hidden in the middle somewhere with some classic snark about commentators):
When I took probability and statistics as an undergraduate in 1966 or so, we spent the whole first semester deriving several different versions of the Central Limit Theorem in several different ways from several different sets of axioms. It was strangely like medieval schoolboys being drilled in Aquinas' five proofs of the existence of God. Only in the second semester, after a suitable reverence for the CLT had been impressed on us, did we actually encounter any of the apparatus of 20th-century inferential statistics that is based on it.
For future reference, the controversies are
- proofs of existence of divinity
- the Central Limit Theorem as an object of a cult of personality
- theory before practice/examples in pedagogy
OK, there was a garden path starting from this other LL post about
inference from myths (that's my description)
These three sportswriters are half-seriously acting out a conversational pattern that takes place over and over again, one which none of us are very well equipped by nature to deal with. In talking about sports (or life), people love to speculate about the causes and consequences of generally-accepted generic propositions. Some of these propositions are true, while others are a compound of stereotype and confirmation bias that don't even rise to the level of sampling error.
