The Wall Street Journal recently had an article about the geometric increase in the number of people who are entering college with advanced placement classes in high school statistics. It has tripled in five years. Similarly jobs in corporations for statisticians have been increasingly abundant and prestige is now associated with the title 'statistician'.
I am a statistician. I am an expert witness in statistics and I have worked for decades using statistical tools. I am very comfortable looking at any set of numbers or charts based on numbers. Glad to hear there is growing prestige for my field.
Most of data I see around me that uses statistics from medical journals to scientific papers continue to show incompetence with statistical process.
I look forward to the day when more people understand and use statistics.
The reason is straightforward: we live in an empiric world that his governed by statistical processes. We can only understand the world we live in by using the statistical tools available that have only been developed in the past 100 years..
The simplest way to see this is to understand that traffic around us, that transportation systems we use and that even weather forecasts and crop pricing require an understanding of statistics to comprehend their operating mechanisms.
My statistics allowed me to be one of the first to realize why the population bomb disappeared in the late 1980's and the reason... still not understood by many people. I also figured out what shabby data supports the human caused global warming hysteria which more and more people are figuring out slowly.
We live in a world of statistical processes and it is as vital to understand as elementary physics, chemistry, biology and technology.