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Why Medium Stats Are A Waste of Time
Big Stats
I used to work as a research scientist. Crunching numbers for a government agency using an archaic mainframe computer.
This was 1993. I was working for the UK Ministry of Agriculture comparing the efficiency of subsoil irrigation versus boom irrigation on potato crops.
How I ended up doing this, I’m not sure — I wanted to be a rock star.
But there I was, weighing potato leaves every day in a government field station in North Nottinghamshire.
By the end of August, after thousands of calculations, I came up with my results.
This isn’t the final graph of course. This is a simulation.
The finished report lies buried deep in the vaults of the Ministry of Food and Fisheries. But the outcome was the same. That upwardly bending inverted arc concluded without reasonable doubt that subsoil irrigation was better than boom irrigation.
It didn’t hit the headlines.
Even before I got the job, I knew this. My boss knew this. The whole world knew this. Monkeys in the Amazon knew this.
