Now that I understand the situation better, I thought I’d share this interesting coincidence.
Last Friday, I was talking my friend’s brother, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering (by all I could tell, a very intelligent man), who had to teach a statistics class to grad students in education. He told what it was like to teach one of their 8-hour lessons, where he had to explain many of the things in the frequentist toolbox.
I told him about my interest in information theory and Bayesian statistics and asked if the course covers any of that. While he showed some familiarity with the term “Bayesian”, he hadn’t heard of any of the related concepts like likelihood ratios and mutual information (!!!).
Statistics actually aren’t used very much in many areas of physics and engineering. It mainly only comes into your work if you are an experimentalist, and even then, a very modest knowledge is often sufficient.
Now that I understand the situation better, I thought I’d share this interesting coincidence.
Last Friday, I was talking my friend’s brother, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering (by all I could tell, a very intelligent man), who had to teach a statistics class to grad students in education. He told what it was like to teach one of their 8-hour lessons, where he had to explain many of the things in the frequentist toolbox.
I told him about my interest in information theory and Bayesian statistics and asked if the course covers any of that. While he showed some familiarity with the term “Bayesian”, he hadn’t heard of any of the related concepts like likelihood ratios and mutual information (!!!).
Bad sign.
Statistics actually aren’t used very much in many areas of physics and engineering. It mainly only comes into your work if you are an experimentalist, and even then, a very modest knowledge is often sufficient.