Patterns and Static:
Philosophy and the Question Concerning Statistics
Computation can be automated.
Judgment cannot.
Book artwork by Alex Stone and Brian Zaharatos
“In the techno-lifeworld in which we now live, statistics plays an ever increasing role. To understand this world requires some understanding of statistics, and this volume provides one of the most graceful, philosophically sensitive introductions to the field.”
—Carl Mitcham, Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines
“Patterns and Static is both a lucid introduction to the philosophy of statistics and a guide to statistics’ thorniest questions. I am a better philosopher and scientist thanks to this book and its author.”
—Ian Van Buskirk, PhD, AI Engineer, Tribe AI
In the age of AI automation
evidence still needs
an interpretation.
AI can write code and automate analyses. It is now reasonable to ask: what work remains for human statisticians and data scientists? At the heart of these disciplines lies not computation, but inference. And yet, there is no consensus about how inference ought to function.
Patterns and Static presents statistics not as a set of methods and algorithms, but a set of competing theories of inference and justification. Readers confront foundational questions: what is inference? How should uncertainty be interpreted? Can statistics reveal causality? Conceptual clarity, rather than computation and code, is the essential human work of science.
