Life and Statistics

I don't really know what I want to talk about today. Maybe I'll talk about statistics! Yeah! How bout I give a quick run down of the methods classes I've taken.

Master's stats sequence, v506 and v507

Ph.D. stats sequence, v606, now enrolled in v607.

Public Program Evaluation

Benefit-Cost Analysis

Research Methods in Public Affairs and Public Policy

Management Science and Operations Research

Currently enrolled in Qualitative Methods

Will take:

Longitudinal data analysis

Meta-analysis

So...impressive right? It looks pretty good on paper. But, the thing is, I'm not sure that I could actually do any real analysis.

That's the thing about statistics; it's very very hard. Even when you learn it, it doesn't stick very well, because it's really not intuitive. There are a lot of concepts that require one to make two, three, four jumps in abstraction (for instance, a Monte Carlo simulation is randomly generated sample of randomly generated samples of some sort of statistical test). And, there are a lot of concepts that look very similar but have very different consequences, and so far, my professors fail to point these subtleties out. Like, the concept of the error term being constant for all observations looks very similar to the concept of the expected value of the error term being zero. Both are important assumptions in Ordinary Least Squares regression, but the consequences of violating them are different.

I'm not very good at this stuff, but I've chosen policy analysis as one of my major fields because I enjoy the opportunity to think in new ways. I'm just going to trust that, somehow, all this quantitative stuff is pushing my brain to be able to do stuff it couldn't do before. I know for damn sure that I wouldn't have been doing things like matrix algebra or Taylor Series expansions or linear programming problems if I had stuck with being a Unitarian pastor.

Life is weird, isn't it? Who woulda thunk it. My dad was an English teacher in a prison, and my mom was a nurse, and now I'm doing quantitative social science? How did that happen? Weird! My parents never went to a political rally in my lifetime! Neither of them ever expressed any interest in social science whatsoever, and they were only mildly interested in politics. The same was true with all of my friend's parents and my parents' friends and life as a whole in Brown County.

I like that I have made some unexpected choices. It makes me feel like my life is my own.