So I’ve come to realize something. Actually, this is something that I realized quite awhile ago, but it’s still relevant: statistics is very intuitive to me. Math is not.

I can’t recall any specific instances or anything like that, but it just seems like anything statistics-related has just made sense to me on some intuitive level that a lot of things in math do not. Even back when I was first starting (like back in STAT 251), I felt like I had a more intuitive grasp on stats.

It’s like…I can explain why some elements in a variance/covariance matrix cannot be larger than someother values and it makes intuitive sense to me, but I can’t (at the same intuitive level) explain what to do with the powers when I’ve got something like (5²)⁸.

Blah. I don’t know. I know that’s a crappy example, and it makes it hard to explain to people why I teach statistics but am still only in calc II.