"The purpose of the subject or discipline ``statistics'' is in essence to answer the question ``could the phenomenon we observed have arisen simply by chance?'', or to quantify the *uncertainty* in any estimate that we make of a quantity."
May I take strong issue with this characterization? It is far too narrow and constraining. We are scientists first and foremost. The most important and useful thing I do is to collaborate with other scientists to frame good questions, design good experiments and studies, and gain insight into the results of those experiments and studies (usually via graphical displays, for which R is superbly suited). Blessing data with P-values is rarely of much importance, and is often frankly irrelevant and even misleading (but that's another rant). George Box said this much better than I: "The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process." This is much much more than you intimate. Cheers to all, Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
