[HN Gopher] The t-test was invented at the Guinness brewery
___________________________________________________________________
The t-test was invented at the Guinness brewery
Author : rmason
Score : 370 points
Date : 2024-05-26 20:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| mmastrac wrote:
| Interesting read. I don't think this came up in my stats classes:
|
| > Gosset solved many problems at the brewery with his new
| technique. The self-taught statistician published his t-test
| under the pseudonym "Student" because Guinness didn't want to tip
| off competitors to its research. Although Gosset pioneered
| industrial quality control and contributed loads of other ideas
| to quantitative research, most textbooks still call his great
| achievement the "Student's t-test."
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| I always thought that name was strange but I never thought to
| look it up. Stats books are so dry, they don't have the
| inclination to share these kinds of stories.
| TillE wrote:
| The history of just about anything is very interesting, but
| it's generally not relevant in a textbook which has a
| specific purpose.
| mp05 wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but I always have wondered what
| t-test a real engineer uses and why they only teach the
| "Student" version. Given the context, a bit of a clarifier
| would have been appreciated.
| alpple wrote:
| I wonder if dry reading means written without the influence
| of drink. I couldn't find an answer online. But, if so, it
| would be ironic to describe a stat book that ignored a brewer
| as dry.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| You probably missed it. This is something stat book authors
| love to mention. I don't remember a stat intro book that
| doesn't have a footnote for "Student t".
| BeetleB wrote:
| Just went through mine a few months ago. It definitely
| doesn't have it.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| what book? i'm honestly curious because of how frequently
| this story is repeated in stats textbooks
| BeetleB wrote:
| The author is Jay Devore.
| nxobject wrote:
| Wait until you hear about the bad blood between Fisher and
| Pearson.
| jldugger wrote:
| > Stats books are so dry, they don't have the inclination to
| share these kinds of stories.
|
| It doesn't have to be that way. My pandemic lockdown read was
| a 10 dollar Stats textbook[1], that comes with tons of
| classic examples: the Salk polio vaccine, a prosecutor
| misusing the multiplication rule using purely circumstantial
| evidence ("what are the odds that police pulled over the
| wrong couple matching 10 different pieces of description by
| the victim?"), the classic Gallup poll showing FDR would
| defeat Landon (versus incumbent _Literary Digest_ showing a
| Landon win), Gosset's history with Guiness, the early history
| of probability as gambling strategy, a controversy over
| Mendel's data on pea plant heredity being _too_ clean, and so
| on.
|
| Sadly, while this book left me well prepared to apply
| statistical reasoning in my day job, it's departure from
| typical pedagogy left me feeling unprepared for further
| reading based on perusal of Stats Wikipedia -- what's a
| kernel? what's a moment? etc.
|
| [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Fourth-David-Freedman-
| eboo...
| madcaptenor wrote:
| In a former life I taught some intro stat courses from this
| book. It's a good book for an intro course for people who
| aren't going on to further stat classes, although I think
| for a current class I'd want something that acknowledges
| how statistics and computers have gotten all tied up with
| each other. (I don't have any recommendations - it's not my
| job to know this any more.)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| sorry but this is a classic story mentioned in almost every
| basic stats textbook i've read
| roenxi wrote:
| Doubly unfortunate because the philosophical aspects of
| statistics are more important to students than most of maths.
| There are something like 4 different schools of thought [0]
| and people will have a natural propensity to one of them.
|
| Although they all agree on the formulas and rigorous aspects,
| it is actually a challenging proposition to comprehend what
| someone is doing if you strongly see the world from one
| perspective and don't realise that academics are potentially
| approaching the interpretation in one of 3 other ways.
|
| It adds a lot of dryness to the textbook because the author
| can really only talk about the objective parts in an
| introductory classroom setting. But if you're getting taught
| by a frequentist and have a subjectivity bent it is easy to
| spend a year or two confused before someone clues you in that
| there are unresolved questions of interpretation.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_probability
| enasterosophes wrote:
| > people will have a natural propensity to one of them.
|
| I see what you did there
| riffraff wrote:
| Interesting, my university book of the subject was pretty
| tiny but it did talk of the different interpretations, but
| it only mentioned frequentist and bayesian. I did not
| suspect the story was much more complicated.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| I liked this one a lot
|
| Abelson, R. P. (1995). Statistics as Principled Argument.
| Psychology Press. https://www.routledge.com/Statistics-As-
| Principled-Argument/...
|
| > In this illuminating volume, Robert P. Abelson delves into
| the too-often dismissed problems of interpreting quantitative
| data and then presenting them in the context of a coherent
| story about one's research. Unlike too many books on
| statistics, this is a remarkably engaging read, filled with
| fascinating real-life (and real-research) examples rather
| than with recipes for analysis. It will be of true interest
| and lasting value to beginning graduate students and seasoned
| researchers alike. The focus of the book is that the purpose
| of statistics is to organize a useful argument from
| quantitative evidence, using a form of principled rhetoric.
| Five criteria, described by the acronym MAGIC (magnitude,
| articulation, generality, interestingness, and credibility)
| are proposed as crucial features of a persuasive, principled
| argument. Particular statistical methods are discussed, with
| minimum use of formulas and heavy data sets. The ideas
| throughout the book revolve around elementary probability
| theory, t tests, and simple issues of research design. It is
| therefore assumed that the reader has already had some access
| to elementary statistics. Many examples are included to
| explain the connection of statistics to substantive claims
| about real phenomena.
| mindcrime wrote:
| At least they let him publish, albeit under a pseudonym. It
| makes me wonder how many potentially useful discoveries were
| made in industrial settings, and wound up being buried due to
| management not wanting to risk leaking competitive information.
| The good news, I suppose, would be if you believe that it's
| rarely the case that only one person could ever discover
| something. Then you can conclude that all (most?) such
| discoveries were eventually (or will eventually be)
| rediscovered independently.
|
| On a related note... I wonder how much valuable research
| disappears (more or less) when companies fold, get acquired,
| etc. Take MCC[1] for example. I've been doing a lot of reading
| lately that involves old papers from the 1990's on "agents" and
| "multi-agent systems". And time and time again, in the
| references, you'll see something like "MCC Technical Report
| TR86-32791" or some-such. Occasionally said report can be found
| online, but quite a few of them seem to be either hard - or
| impossible - to find. Maybe there's an archive of physical
| papers stored away somewhere, but FSM knows where the heck such
| a thing would be, or how hard it would be to get access.
|
| A similar situation came up a while back when we started
| discussing "sharding" here on HN[2]. There was a lot of effort
| spent trying to identify when the term first arose, and a lot
| of evidence pointed to a particular paper that was internal to
| CCA, who were acquired by Xerox. And now that original paper
| seems to be unobtanium. The paper probably still _exists_
| somewhere in the bowels of Xerox, but good luck ever getting
| your hands on it.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectronics_and_Computer_...
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36848605
| schneems wrote:
| > It makes me wonder how many potentially useful discoveries
| were made in industrial settings, and wound up being buried
| due to management not wanting to risk
|
| Probably a lot. I've come to find out that some dinosaur
| companies won't even let their programmers open up issues on
| open source repos (forget sending patches or releasing their
| own software).
|
| The logic goes like this: if someone found the log4j zero day
| before it was reported they could comb through all issues and
| see the companies that the users worked for then try to
| target them. In this case any comment would indicate possible
| involvement.
|
| The least bit of security, through the tiniest extra bit of
| obscurity. Thankfully many of these companies are starting to
| come around and realizing that a lack of involvement with
| open source is more risky than accidental 3rd hand
| information leaking (like what dependencies doesn't certain
| company use).
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The easiest counter to this is that, to my knowledge at
| least, it's easier to build a vulnerability scanner than to
| scrape repos for more targeted attacks.
| schneems wrote:
| The "No lieutenant, your men are already dead" defense. I
| like it.
|
| I think that if your threat model includes nation states
| (and the companies I was referencing above was largely
| S&P500 financial institutions) then you have to think the
| attacker also doesn't want to trip off any alarms with a
| ham fisted port scan blasting the precious zeroday
| exploit all over the internet. Your point is still
| extremely valid though.
|
| Which is why the counter I provided is that the best
| defense is to get as many engineers' eyes on the problem
| and in the codebase as possible to prevent or find it
| before it becomes an issue. Things like lib XZ are scary,
| but it's even scarier if not caught before it's in the
| wild.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The dirty secret is that nation states can get your
| software dependency list pretty easily in a number of
| ways (e.g. sending agents to meetups to nerd out & make
| friends would be an expensive way but there's other
| social engineering attacks I've observed).
|
| The other secret is that monitoring software can't detect
| anomalies ahead of time & the vulnerability scan will not
| show up meaningfully any different than all the other
| random traffic already happening. Your nation state can
| hide it's vulnerability scan amongst all the other
| vulnerability scanners already running (both legit as a
| service when you request it against your server &
| illegitimate actors trying to find a way in). So at best
| a ham fisted search is unlikely to really tip your hand
| in a meaningful way unless it requires having penetrated
| a few layers of your security to begin with.
|
| As for libxz, the scary part is that as an industry we
| recognize the security challenge of not compensating
| maintainers and yet we have lackluster responses to
| fixing it (e.g. Google trying to pay OSS maintainers to
| harden their security while completely ignoring that a
| huge problem is that the maintainers can't devote full
| time which opens an avenue for malicious actors to
| overwhelm maintainers & take control socially as happened
| with libxz).
| xeonmc wrote:
| relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/664/
| mindcrime wrote:
| Nice. I had not seen that particular XKCD before. Good one!
| CrazyStat wrote:
| This is such a great story, it should be included in every
| intro stats class (I did, back when I taught intro stats).
|
| Gosset didn't have the mathematical background to derive the
| correct distribution theoretically, so he figured out what it
| was by simulating drawing samples of different sizes thousands
| of times and fitting curves. Simulating, in those days, meant
| writing numbers on thousands of cards, then shuffling and
| drawing a sample. Calculate the mean and standard deviation.
| Repeat. Thousands of times. He published the result with an
| apologetic shrug for not being able to prove it properly.
| richrichie wrote:
| along with compulsory Guinness tasting :)
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Um. Wow. That's quite a story. But, it's not real. "owever,
| Guinness had a policy of not publishing company data, and
| allowed Gosset to publish his observations on the strict
| understanding that he did so anonymously."
|
| I'm 1906, Gosset was the guest of Person at UCL, and since
| Gosset had a First in Math, and Professor Pearson was the
| leading mathematician and publisher of the Bell curve..
|
| Gosset spent a year at UCL. University College London. A year
| with an expert looking over his shoulder? I would think that
| he would publish with an extreme amount of confidence,
| forgoing the need for an apolocetic shrug, which I have never
| ever heard of. Never, and I have a degree in math with a
| minor in Statistics. They had playing cards. You are arguing
| for large sample sizes, which is not economical - precisely
| against the design of the test - which looks surprisingly
| suspicious.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > But, it's not real. "owever, Guinness had a policy of not
| publishing company data, and allowed Gosset to publish his
| observations on the strict understanding that he did so
| anonymously."
|
| Except that this part _is_ true. Obviously, he is well-
| known in academic circles, but Guinness did have a policy
| against its employees to publish their research using a
| pseudonym[1].
|
| [1] Specifically, they can publish with three conditions:
|
| 1) To not mention Guinness or its competitors,
|
| 2) To not mention anything about beer (so topics
| specifically about beer is forbidden), and
|
| 3) To not publish using their surname (which in practical
| effect is to publish using a pseudonym).
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > I would think that he would publish with an extreme
| amount of confidence, forgoing the need for an apolocetic
| shrug, which I have never ever heard of. Never, and I have
| a degree in math with a minor in Statistics.
|
| Good for you. As you might have guessed from reading that I
| used to teach statistics, I have a _bit_ more than a minor
| in the subject. Your attempt to appeal to authority, not to
| put too fine a point on it, falls flat.
|
| Just because you haven't heard of a thing don't mean it
| isn't true. We can, after all, just read the original
| paper:
|
| > Before I had succeeded in solving my problem
| analytically, I had endeavoured to do so empirically. The
| material used was a correlation table containing the height
| and left middle finger measurements of 3000 criminals, from
| a paper by W. R. Macdonnell (Biometrika, i, p. 219). The
| measurements were written out on 3000 pieces of cardboard,
| which were then very thoroughly shuffled and drawn at
| random. As each card was drawn its numbers were written
| down in a book, which thus contains the measurements of
| 3000 criminals in a random order. Finally, each consecutive
| set of 4 was taken as a sample--750 in all--and the mean,
| standard deviation, and correlation5 of each sample
| determined. The difference between the mean of each sample
| and the mean of the population was then divided by the
| standard deviation of the sample, giving us the z of
| Section III.
|
| As for the apologetic shrug, in the course of the "analytic
| solution" we have:
|
| > The law of formation of these moment coefficients appears
| to be a simple one, but I have not seen my way to a general
| proof.
|
| and then after a bit more math guessing the correct
| distribution based on the moments
|
| > Consequently a curve of Prof. Pearson's Type III may he
| expected to fit the distribution of s2.
|
| My story is slightly off; Gosset only used one sample size
| rather than several different sample sizes. But he did use
| simulation with thousands of hand written cards as his
| approach to the problem, he did fail to prove the correct
| distribution (moments are not sufficient to determine the
| distribution), and he did publish with an apologetic shrug.
| jll29 wrote:
| Typo: guest of Person => Karl Pearson
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| It's interesting how mathematically shallow most stats
| presentations are. In most other areas I've studied, you
| start from some basics like axioms and gradually build up
| machinery by proving theorems etc. But presentations I've
| seen of the t-test focus on when and how to use it, without
| going very deep into the derivation at all.
|
| This leaves me skeptical of the movement to replace calculus
| with stats in high school. It's true that an ordinary citizen
| will find stats more useful. But for students who will go on
| to become scientists and engineers, I think they should study
| calculus. Calculus is a better on-ramp to the sort of rigor
| you need in upper-level math. And I'm concerned that a bad
| "cargo cult" stats class may be worse than no stats education
| at all. Calculus education seems harder to screw up.
| blt wrote:
| Not sure why you are downvoted for this. Your points have
| merit. I agree that stats classes can have a "cookbook"
| flavor and do not generally lead to a deep understanding of
| probability. But I would rather fix the stats classes than
| abandon the topic.
|
| Does anyone really argue to _replace_ calculus with stats?
| I thought the idea was to offer both and let students
| choose based on their interests.
| jll29 wrote:
| Propbabilities, combinatorics, logics and sets are the
| most valuable things from high school maths that
| benefitted me all the way through from teenager to
| professor.
|
| Calculus is intellectually stimulating, but for my line
| of work (dealing with uncertaintly, risk, decision
| making, AI), other parts of mathematics are more useful.
| However, I would not argue calculus should be replaced. I
| would argue for more "proper" maths to replace "recipe-
| like" maths. It's more important to go deeper on a topic
| than what the topic is.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Combinatorics would make a great high school math course,
| honestly. Lots of fun puzzles and very approachable.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Calculus is also mathematically shallow in that sense: the
| subject where you start with axioms and gradually build up
| the machinery of calculus is (Real) Analysis, which is not
| part of the standard calculus curriculum and which the vast
| majority of people taking calculus will never study [1]. A
| typical Calculus class expects students to memorize and use
| things like trig function integrals which are presented
| without proof; not so different from memorizing and using
| statistical tests presented without proof, in my opinion.
|
| In an intro statistics class I think conceptual depth is
| more important than mathematical depth. It's more important
| that students really understand the concept of
| probabilistic inference, both hypothesis tests and
| confidence intervals, than that they understand the
| mathematical derivation of the t distribution [2].
|
| Unfortunately intro stats classes often fail on this count
| as well. One of the (many) straws that eventually broke my
| desire to teach was a committee decision--a committee
| composed entirely of people _not_ teaching intro stats--to
| disallow students from bringing formula cheatsheets to
| exams, effectively forcing us to make the students memorize
| formulas rather than focusing on conceptual understanding.
|
| [1] When I took Real Analysis there was a calculus class
| that met right before us in the same room, which often ran
| over so that the calculus students would be packing up as
| we entered the room. One day as we're sitting down one of
| them asks us what class we're there for, and then asks what
| Real Analysis is all about, since he's never heard of it.
| One of my classmates responded with the absolutely perfect
| "Well, our homework last night was integrating x^2 from 0
| to 1."
|
| [2] I'd say the same goes for Calculus, for what it's
| worth; actually understanding what an integral _means_ is
| more important than being able to set up the Reimann sum
| and take the limit.
| petesoper wrote:
| 54 years after I was mystified trying to parse the use of
| "student" for this, here is the answer. Cool!
| squirrel6 wrote:
| This was in my textbook and my professor covered it as well!
| Class of 17 here
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I always found "student" confusing in the name. Like, is there
| a "professors t-test" or something?
|
| I personally found a lot of peace after learning that tidbit.
| jll29 wrote:
| Many international conferences are regularly held in Dublin,
| and attendees often visit the Guinness brewery as part of
| conferences' social events, where a memorial plaque reminds
| them of Gosset and his important contributions to statistics.
| schneems wrote:
| I did a talk in 2019 where I mention that tidbit. Of course, to
| properly do it justice I had to bring a Guinness and open it on
| stage.
|
| Here's a video from EuRuKo that was filmed on a decommissioned
| ocean liner converted into a hotel and conf space
| https://youtu.be/Aczy01drwkg?si=lsVWAFv9f3eLc2fZ&t=1095
| apsurd wrote:
| damn, unfortunate the rabbit makes this unwatchable.
|
| otherwise, i love beer and great story, i'll just read about
| it.
| schneems wrote:
| I agree. You can read the talk here
| https://www.schneems.com/2020/09/16/the-lifechanging-
| magic-o....
|
| I introduced the voiceover artist at the beginning, she's a
| Japanese speaker that I found on fiver. I chose her because
| the talk was being given at a Japanese speaking conference
| (Ruby Kaigi).
|
| I love the foil of having a second character on screen but
| having an accented cartoon was not the right effect I was
| going for.
|
| I'm still experimenting with multiple characters in my talks
| but my most recent one I did doesn't use any actors and I
| read their lines like a narrator. I think the effect works
| much better https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-8UQMH6p-Mw&list=PL
| 9oQ7yETvN12...
| apsurd wrote:
| ah, appreciate the reply, and the spirit of creativity.
|
| Kinda feel like I got caught being overly critical and here
| is the actual creator! Thanks for receiving it well and
| also for putting your stuff out there.
| schneems wrote:
| I'm kinda glad you said something to be honest. I wanted
| to mention the voiceover being cringe but it's also hard
| to pre-apologize for something without raising a lot of
| alarm bells.
|
| I'm still proud of the overall talk. I'm glad I pushed a
| limit, found it, and learned from it.
|
| Your comment stated what you saw and how you felt about
| it. I think you did a great job speaking up without
| lashing out or talking down. I appreciate that.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i would advise maybe toning down the strength of your
| criticism when addressing the creator of the content /2c
| schneems wrote:
| I appreciate you sticking up for me. I can see this comment
| being taken poorly by others. I also think we generally
| need to learn to empathize that the creator might
| experience our words different than how we mean them (and
| therefore be kinder when we post).
|
| In this case, I was aware that the rabbit is tough to watch
| so I have the empathy for my viewer and the comment came
| across as honest rather than harsh. I don't think you
| should be downvoted. If it was a different time or place
| then I 100% could have taken it the wrong way.
| tombert wrote:
| This doesn't surprise me; any industry involved with basically
| any manufacturing seems like a perfect testing ground for
| statistical methods. There's enough scale in these things where
| subtle differences can save tons of money, so it can be
| beneficial pretty quickly.
|
| I always thought the t-test was clever just because of how simple
| it was compared to more advanced stuff.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| We covered this in my Research Methods class as part of my
| Systems Engineering Masters. Growing and agriculture in the
| early 1900s benefitted from things like ANOVA, blocking
| factors, nuisance factors, factors, levels, ranges and
| experiment design such as full factorial design. It is taken
| for granted these days. F statistic, F crit, etc
| OisinMoran wrote:
| Guinness was way ahead of their time and in many ways the Google
| of their day (building accomodation, high pay, great perks). My
| granddad worked there so all my dad's brother and sisters learned
| to swim in the Guinness swimming pool!
|
| Funnest tidbit is that the widget to get a good head from cans
| won the best invention of the year, the year the internet wax
| invented.
|
| For an excellent piece on many more interesting bits about
| Guinness, check this out: https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/no-
| great-stagnation-in-guin...
| mcphage wrote:
| I don't think I'll ever be interested in Internet Wax.
| rob74 wrote:
| It also apparently pioneered the practice of companies getting
| tax (or in their case, lease) concessions for "investing in
| Ireland"...
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Since you called them the google of the day, it's only fitting
| to mention that Guinness in "The Guinness book of record"
| refers to the brewery.
|
| And much like how we use Google to settle discussion in pubs
| today, the book was published to do that very same thing, back
| then.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| Wow, forcing visitors to individually disable 6 types of cookies.
| :thumbsdown.tif:
| jhbadger wrote:
| I love these sorts of of things. I was fortunate enough to have
| this fact mentioned in my stats book in undergrad, and later when
| I was in Dublin and touring the Guinness brewery, they had a
| small exhibit on Gosset (although Gossett was actually based out
| of their brewery in England). Another fun fact that I learned in
| organic chemistry was that Alexander Borodin (the Russian
| composer who composed "In the Steppes of Central Asia" and
| "Prince Igor") was only a composer in his spare time and was
| actually professionally an organic chemist who was the co-
| discoverer of the aldol reaction
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Borodin
| gwern wrote:
| I feel like OP unfortunately mostly misses the point of Gosset's
| work and the t-test, in the usual way of people taught the
| contemporary bastardization of Gosset/Fisher/Pearson/Neyman as
| NHST. The important thing isn't that it lets you calculate some
| _p_-value; the important thing is that it is a framework for
| _decision-making_ , where you can trade off your false-positive
| _and_ your false-negative rates to make the economically rational
| decision:
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2018.1...
|
| In this case, because it is a well-understood problem with the
| rates of bad batches easily established from the brewery's
| records of testing & drinking, it lets the brewery decide on how
| many 'off' batches it wants to risk in exchange for saving the
| cost of a certain number of test-samples. You decide you want to
| risk 1 bad batch in 100 for a false negative while rejecting 1
| good batch in 20, then you need _n_ samples etc. And this
| directly translates better measurements (by lowering variance,
| eg. by blocking) into money: the lower the variance, the fewer
| samples you need to achieve any given tradeoff, thereby saving
| the brewery money on scrapped material or testing. The smaller
| the better, hence Student's inability to use asymptotics or
| approximations: they might be off by orders of magnitude. (He
| would even try to do _n_ = 2 tests!)
|
| Or they might be trying to tightly optimize alcohol content, to
| avoid taxation for passing high-alcohol content thresholds, but
| also avoid going too low to disappoint their customers, so
| Student would explicitly calculate out scenarios, for example:
|
| > Thus, Gosset concluded, "In order to get the accuracy we
| require [that is, 10 to 1 odds with 0.5 accuracy], we must,
| therefore, take the mean of [at least] four determinations." The
| Guinness Board cheered. The Apprentice Brewer found an economical
| way to assess the behavior of population parameters, using very
| small samples.
|
| (If you're thinking this sounds like a very subjective-Bayesian
| decision-theory thing to write, you are right, although Student
| would have rejected that, like most statisticians, and emphasized
| that he was dealing with populations with known base rates, and
| so nothing Bayesian was necessary; it was just a frequentist
| decision-theory approach.)
| nextos wrote:
| That article you posted is excellent, thank you. Also relevant:
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.1982.10...
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Another fun bit of biochemical history: Chaim Weizmann (1) was a
| biochemist and staunch Zionist who gained the attention of First
| Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, for cultivating
| a bacterium, Clostridium acetobutylicum, that could produce
| acetone, which was in short supply and required for the
| production of cordite, the key propellent in naval artillery
| during World War I. In gratitude for Weizmann's contribution to
| the war effort, George Lloyd asked him what Britain could do for
| him, to which he replied "not for me, but for my people", which
| begat the Balfour Declaration (2) establishing Britain's
| commitment to provide a Home for the Jewish People (3).
|
| (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann
|
| (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
|
| (3) It is essentially lost to history that the Balfour
| Declaration also provided that the Palestinian people should not
| be displaced. It is also mostly lost to history that there was a
| great deal of politicking between Weizmann arriving in England
| and his audience with George Lloyd, including a world tour
| Weizmann orchestrated to promote one Albert Einstein.
| rmason wrote:
| I continue to be amazed the things you learn on HN. When I was
| in Poland last summer I learned that a number of Jewish leaders
| there between the two world wars advocated for a Jewish
| homeland. But they were never able to convince the government
| to publicly declare that support. Despite the fact at the time
| Jews made up to 25% of Poland's population.
| acidioxide wrote:
| That's wrong. Polish state from 1926 onwards supported
| Zionists (in the years 1926-1939, Poland was ruled by the
| authoritarian Sanation movement).
| rmason wrote:
| Verified you are correct. Yet the museums I toured in both
| Warsaw and Gdansk gave me the exact opposite impression.
| riffraff wrote:
| I've heard that tour was also accidentally the reason Einstein
| became such a household name and face, tho I'm not so convinced
| this is true.
| jojobas wrote:
| > Palestinian people should not be displaced
|
| This was always wishful thinking at best, and more
| realistically a lie.
| cnlevy wrote:
| Hmmm, those palestinian Arabs that made peace with the Jews
| in the 1948 civil war are still there; see
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghosh
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_al-Fahm
| jojobas wrote:
| Doesn't prove much. The Jews needed the fertile lands that
| were very much settled, there were not all flocking there
| for some desert.
|
| Quoting Ben-Gurion:
|
| A people which fights against the usurpation of its land
| will not tire so easily. ... When we say that the Arabs are
| the aggressors and we defend ourselves -- this is only half
| the truth. ... [P]olitically we are the aggressors and they
| defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they
| inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down,
| and in their view we want to take away from them their
| country.
| cafard wrote:
| Pedantry: David Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the later
| part of WW I and for a time after.
| hnbad wrote:
| It also can't be overstated that Balfour himself was a staunch
| racist and antisemite. His motivation for passing the
| Declaration was at least in part the idea that if the UK gives
| the Jews their own country, the UK will have a powerful ally in
| the global Jewish conspiracy - and also encourage Jews to leave
| the UK and not manipulate in its politics, culture and economy.
|
| From Balfour's own writing in 1919 cited in his Wikipedia
| article:
|
| > [Zionism would] mitigate the age-long miseries created for
| Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body
| [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even
| hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.
|
| He's the best example how support of Zionism and antisemitism
| aren't mutually contradictory and can actually go hand in hand.
| It's likewise often lost on people that there was a Zionist
| project helping German Jews emigrate to Palestine with support
| of the German government even after Hitler came to power,
| although of course (like all migration) it ended with the
| beginning of World War 2. This isn't to say the Nazis were fond
| of this project but they didn't actively oppose it. They did
| however pass laws requiring emigrating Jews to liquidate their
| assets (i.e. sell off any businesses or property) and
| significantly limiting the amount of wealth they could transfer
| out of the country just like they later dispossessed (and
| subsequently re-privatized) Jewish business owners and
| confiscated their property during the Holocaust.
| pjmorris wrote:
| > "It is essentially lost to history"
|
| In practice, this is clearly true. But it is not for lack of
| trying, at least on some people's parts. I recently read 'A
| Peace to End All Peace', David Fromkin, which goes in depth
| into the background here, including Weizmann's role and the
| making of the Balfour declaration. A passage from the book's
| conclusion has stuck with me:
|
| "It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-
| Roman crisis of social and political identity: nearly a
| thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political
| organization, and nearly five hundred years more to determine
| which nations were entitled to be states. Whether civilization
| would survive the raids and conflicts of rival warrior bands;
| whether church or state, pope or emperor, would rule; whether
| Catholic or Protestant would prevail in Christendom; whether
| dynastic empire, national state, or city-state would command
| fealty; and whether, for example, a townsman of Dijon belonged
| to the Burgundian or to the French nation, were issues
| painfully worked out through ages of searching and strife,
| during which the losers--the Albigensians of southern France,
| for example--were often annihilated. It was only at the end of
| the nineteenth century, with the creation of Germany and Italy,
| that an accepted map of western Europe finally emerged, some
| 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete.
| The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove
| to be nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting. But its
| issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create
| new political identities for themselves after the collapse of
| an ages-old imperial order to which they had grown accustomed."
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| One big difference with the Middle East is that the present
| day borders were largely drawn up by foreign powers (England,
| France) rather than evolving organically as they did in post-
| Roman Europe. This is also a source of much of the ongoing
| conflicts in the region including Israel/Palestine.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| TBF, England and France took hundreds of years drawing up
| their own borders between each other
| leoc wrote:
| I'm _not_ saying that this is a bad comment, or that it should
| not have been made; but at the same time, I _am_ also a bit
| wearied to see that the HN comment section has achieved a Time
| To Palestine of 1 on this post.
| jhardy54 wrote:
| I'm _not_ saying that this is a bad comment, or that it
| should not have been made; but at the same time, I am also a
| bit wearied to see that the HN comment section has achieved a
| Time To "Time To Palestine" Palestine of 2 on this post.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| These low effort posts are against the HN guidelines and
| also not terribly clever.
| racional wrote:
| "Britain's commitment to provide a Home for the Jewish People
| ... _in a place other than Europe_ " is the key detail that's
| missing here.
|
| It wasn't like they all got together and said, you know, it's
| time we did the Jewish People a solid for once.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Well, now I hate him. Thanks.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _It is essentially lost to history that the Balfour
| Declaration also provided that the Palestinian people should
| not be displaced._
|
| It is equally essentially lost on most people today, that the
| Balfour Declaration did not create the state of Israel, nor did
| the United Nations create it, nor the UK, nor the US, nor was
| it post-war "resettlement plan" for displaced Jews by the
| Allies. To the contrary, Jews at that time were barred from
| entering the British Mandate.
|
| Israelis declared themselves a state, similar to Americans
| declaring themselves independent of Britain, against the wishes
| of the UK. So it should also be noted that no "plan" for that
| region called for a civil war: but a civil war broke out. So
| it's revisionist shoehorning of the events that played out to
| say that they didn't match such and such of various plans that
| may have previously been made but never came to fruition. The
| cis-Jordan Arabs were not treated worse by the Israelis than
| they themselves were attempting to treat the Israelis; the
| Arabs did lose the military conflict, however, after which they
| displaced their own longstanding Jewish populations.
| mcdonje wrote:
| This story appears in "How to Measure Anything" by Douglas
| Hubbard, which is worth a read if you're not already a stats and
| decision theory whiz.
| mcmoor wrote:
| This Guiness connection is the core of the jokes when explaining
| about t-test in Larry Gonick's History of Statistics.
| colmmacc wrote:
| My first year of working at AWS was in the "DUB1" site, which was
| part of the Digital Hub (a tech and incubator space). As it
| happened ... Amazon's small office was in William Sealy Gosset's
| old laboratory, right beside St. Patrick's Tower where the
| Guinness cooperage was. As a former statistics lecturer, I
| excitedly told everyone I worked with how lucky we were, to
| almost no reaction! Can you imagine?
|
| A long time ago I submitted William Sealy Gosset as a suggestion
| for commemoration with an Irish Postage Stamp; but nothing has
| ever come of it. I hope some day he gets more recogonition.
| iamcreasy wrote:
| > Gosset recognized that this approach only worked with large
| sample sizes, whereas small samples of hops wouldn't guarantee
| that normal distribution. So he meticulously tabulated new
| distributions for smaller sample sizes.
|
| Does it mean Gosset stop before the distribution converging to
| normal distribution?
| VagabundoP wrote:
| I went to school beside the Guinness brewery. The smell of the
| hops brewing will remain with me forever.
|
| However the school was dirt poor in many ways and they wouldn't
| sponsor our school football team to buy some kit. This was back
| in the 80's Ireland with massive unemployment and huge
| emigration.
|
| Ironically the school had a computer lab way beyond its time when
| one ex-pupil donated a couple of Apple Macs and a dozen Apple
| IIe's. That's were I cut my teeth on some - probably BASIC -
| programming, learning myself.
|
| On Topic - Guinness were always canny and ahead of their time.
| Getting a job there was like winning the lotto, you were pretty
| much made for life.
| paperhatwriter wrote:
| Comparing Guinness to an 'earthy milkshake' is one of the worst
| things I've ever read.
| hoseja wrote:
| Artificially pumping beer full of nitrogen is kinda weird you
| gotta admit.
| mrob wrote:
| The nitrogen is just a propellant for forcing the beer through
| tiny holes that make the dissolved CO2 come out of solution in
| tiny bubbles, which form a more stable foam. Very little
| nitrogen actually dissolves into the beer.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Louis Pasteur developed his technique for wine and beer, and milk
| would benefit years later.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization
| westurner wrote:
| The students' t distribution has a symmetric PDF (with no skew),
| and thus you assume that the sample and/or population also have
| such a PDF (Probability Distribution Function).
|
| t statistic > History:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-statistic#History
|
| Students' t distribution:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-distribution
|
| "What are some alternatives to sample mean and t-test when
| comparing highly skewed distributions"
| https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-alternatives-to-sample-m... :
|
| >> _the Kolmogorov-Smirnov two-sample test, which essentially
| compares the empirical distribution functions of the two samples
| without implicitly assuming
| normality.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov-Smirnov_test _
|
| > _You may also be interested in the Wald-Wolfowitz runs test
| (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wald-Wolfowitz_runs_test ) and the
| Mann-Whitney test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann-Whitney_U
| )._
|
| Statistical Significance > Limitations, Challenges:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance#Limit...
|
| Statistical hypothesis test > Criticism, Alternatives:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_hypothesis_test#Cr...
|
| There are Multivariate Students' t distributions:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_t-distribution
|
| Matrix t distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_t-
| distribution :
|
| > _The generalized matrix t-distribution is the compound
| distribution that results from an infinite mixture of a matrix
| normal distribution with an inverse multivariate gamma
| distribution placed over either of its covariance matrices._
|
| But does a _matrix_ t-distribution describe nonlinear variance in
| complex wave functions?
|
| Quantum statistical mechanics:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_statistical_mechanics :
|
| > _In quantum mechanics a statistical ensemble (probability
| distribution over possible quantum states) is described by a
| density operator S, which is a non-negative, self-adjoint, trace-
| class operator of trace 1 on the Hilbert space H describing the
| quantum system._
|
| A Q12 question: How frequently are quantum density operators
| described by a parametric t distribution?
| the-mitr wrote:
| I read this story and several other very interesting ones in this
| great book detailing the history of evolution of modern
| statistics -- The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized
| Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg.
|
| The author himself personally met with several leading figures
| that he describes. Highly recommended!
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder about the actual utility of the T-test
| compared to just looking at a pair of boxplots, with jittered
| points (or some other indication of the number of data points).
|
| If it isn't plainly evident from the boxplots (assuming you've
| got "enough points") do T-tests alone ever make a truly
| compelling argument?
| tmoravec wrote:
| That would not be exactly scientific. T-test can be calculated
| independently and verified.
| _dain_ wrote:
| But you still need to choose a significance threshold, which
| is just an opinion. There's nothing "scientific" about
| p=0.05; surely God loves p=0.06 almost as much.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| The article left me wondering: how long after Guinness invented
| the t-test did the hop growers invent p-hacking?
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