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certainty

(originally posted on 7/7/2013)

Statistics is probably the most dreaded course among my science/engineering friends. It is known to be boring, difficult and tedious. But many, many programs require it, from business, economics, finance to biology, physics, engineering. It is no surprise that stats is required among so many majors.

Statistics illuminate an inherent and unavoidable part of life: uncertainty.

When I started reading "How Randomness Rules our Lives" by Leonard Mlodinow about a year ago, I started to become more aware of how probability is useful to my many practical needs, and how random our universe is.

If there is one most significant thing I learned from being a teenager, through both my academic and personal life, it would be that certainty is non-existence. Simplest things like measuring contains such much uncertainty that correcting for the error becomes its own subject of study.

But in life, are we ever certain about any decisions we make? Maybe we pick the least uncertain decisions out of the options we have, but how certain are we of them?

So now, coming out of teen years, I realize the luckiest of my peers are those who have such a determined idea of what their futures look like, and the number of people I know who do are so very little. Among the many early-20s that I know, I am one of the few who have found what I want to do and know how to achieve it.

Of course I'm not certain that what I want right now is what I will want in 5 or 10 years. And no one can be so sure. And the feeling that coming-of-age novels commonly characterize of teenagers is exactly this fearful feeling of uncertainty and being lost in it. But the truth is, it will never go away. One would just become more aware of it and know to deal with it, like professional statisticians at work. That's when teenagers grow up and see the world with all its probabilities and uncertainties, and embrace the beauty of it.

After all, uncertainty, probability and possibilities are the same thing.

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”

Søren KierkegaardEither/Or: A Fragment of Life




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