Iconic Things My Coding Professors Have Said (Part 6)
"We'll have two follow-up sessions where you can present your thesis and then, as a group, dicuss your problems... with the thesis. Your problems with the THESIS. I should probably specify that"
"the dataset we're using is the queer csv file which is a very interesting and... naughty dataset”
"why do we like the wilcoxon test? well, it’s widely applicable, free of assumptions, insensitive to outliers, and conceptually simple... this could be a brochure"
"running the test is usually simple. interpreting the output is what makes statistics... fun"
Student: "can you explain what the e means?" Prof 1: "of course, let me write it up" Prof 2: "professor 1 studied mathetmatics" Prof 1: " only for one year" Prof 2: "well, that’s still more than i ever did"
"read through this at your own pace at home. i don't explain it in class becuase then i have to watch people's brains explode and the cleaning staff are starting to complain"
"we'll end with a very nice case on harry potter because it seems everyone loves harry potter so hopefully that'll make up for the boring statistics that are about to follow"
Prof: "any questions?" Student: "yeah, can you explain again what the 'true location shift' means?" Prof: "... that's not important"
"this test is more difficult to run. You could say that it comes with its own issues, but don't we all?"
"you will rarely need this test, often people are just... not interested in it"
"the hypothesis was that they made the sentences shorter and used easier words because the american children were too stupid to understand. that's not what I’M saying, that's what the statistics say"
"neither of these are normally distributed, so we can't apply a t-test. You could remove the outliers and try again, but this is a tricky decision to make, and we won't be making it today"
Student: "where do we submit the homework?" Prof: "you don't. you don't submit the homework. its for your own joy and pleasure. no submission required. just joy"
Prof: "however, there's one thing missing from all this. does anyone know what it is?" Student: "causation?" Prof: "god no! that's FAR too meta. this is machine learning, not real life"
"so this, this right here... this is a bullshit example"
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14












