Personality differences

I am currently in the middle of some statistics reading.

A significant part of my capstone project is going to be crunching the numbers on the learners' experience going through my learning module. My hope is that reading these books now will give me some inspiration about what to look at and what measurements would be helpful.

Right now I am halfway through the third of five books; there will obviously be a later post about the project overall.

The best so far has been The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg.

(Published in 2001, and maybe not incredibly popular, it may take a little extra looking but I think is worth the effort.) 

It may be the most helpful for my goal; even the title refers to a question that arose over how something could be proved... how to test, how many times to test, etc. Then, it goes over other developments and the situations that inspired them.

There are some great stories with some interesting characters, some of whom were known for their generosity as mentors and others who could be quite frustrating. 

One of the notable frustrating ones was Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher. Some of his students went on to do great work, so he probably could be inspiring, but he could also really hold a grudge and then use that grudge to discount a person's work, no matter how correct or significant that work was.

(It is perhaps not a surprise that he got pretty passionate about eugenics.)

Here is an interesting thing about Fisher: he had remarkably poor eyesight (that may make his interests in eugenics not well-thought out). His math instruction needed to adapt to that, using different methods not relying on him being able to read or see. This helped him develop a way of viewing things in more geometric terms. That probably was a critical factor in his ability to not only conceive of concepts differently -- coming up with innovative solutions -- but also part of why others had difficulty understanding his work and why Fisher could be so dismissive of other people's completely reasonable solutions to various issues.

There are a couple of things that I find interesting here.

One is that the other mathematics branches that came up the most in the reading were algebra and calculus. Having noticed in school that most people either struggled with algebra or geometry (but were usually okay with the other one), I have to assume that there are different mental processes with the two. That particular difference would affect perspective.

At the same time, the more geometric perspective isn't necessarily superior to the algebraic one, at least not overall. There might be times when the geometric perspective would work better and other times when the algebraic one would.

That's why it was so interesting that a lot of the history referred to collaborations. Some of the collaborators struggled, coming out with different results, but persistence allowed them to learn new things that they would not have gotten on their own.

Perhaps even more interesting is that sometimes older reasoning that had been retired would become helpful again for certain situations.

I have been thinking about that more due to examples of people being unpleasantly certain (and sometimes certainly wrong). 

If we really want to find answers I believe it will take respecting each other.

Related posts:

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2026/06/perspective-check.html