Jan 15, 2021
Is modeling uncertainty worth the effort ?
a contemplation on the reasons to study the theory of randomness
The past month, when I was working out a problem, it struck me that there is no point of studying Statistics. We cannot estimate with a 100% confidence what will happen. After all the hard work, learning and fitting multiple models; many a times, we get highly unexpected results. Those results might be good or bad. Irrespective, I was not able to provide myself one good reason to study the subject and why so much effort needs to be put into studying something, only to get a totally unexpected outcome. The question occurred to me multiple times, however, after a few days I stopped pursuing it. I left it as pondering thought, unanswered, in my head. Every time it came up, I shut it down, as I could never argue to support the study.
Should we stop studying the subject ? After all, what is the point? Only that which is supposed to happen, will happen. Yesterday I was watching a video where they spoke of Statistics and it’s study. The Question surfaced again. Only this time, with an answer! There is no doubt that sometimes, we are totally caught off guard by the world, however, the answer I got does give me reason enough to keep studying and perfecting this science.
We know that the world is uncertain, it is dynamic, and anything can happen at any point in time. We also know that we cannot estimate an outcome with a 100% confidence, however, ruling out uncertainty all in all would be a bigger mistake than considering it as a parameter in a study, however imperfect our model of this uncertainty might be. Randomness is part of the equation of this world. It cannot be avoided and ruled out. We therefore, study the subject and try and model this uncertainty. It is absolutely amazing how we can have so far managed to study something that is random. And sometimes, maybe not always, we even manage to predict outcomes precisely. It is for these few times we continue to perfect our study of the theory of randomness and maybe sometime down the road even perfect it !
