I don't quite know what you're getting at there. When you stress understanding, my immediate thought is that anyone who truly understands statistics would probably distrust the use of statistics in anything but pure mathematical puzzles. As soon as you try to apply them to complex, interesting real life you are making assumptions that are really just guesswork. These give you the financial crashes, and self-driving car crashes, that the statistics don't predict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_assumption
To me, the highlighted text is just a fancy way of saying that you should think hard about your hand waving before attempting to justify the statistical approach you have taken. What follows may be extremely rigorous and mathematical but ultimately founded upon hand waving.
@Cosmik , my point is that statistics - not as a university course - but as an intuitive way of handling the complicated and the complex is underestimated.
I like the claim that «neutrality is a safe choice». To me, this is statistics. And I see it as clear as I can laugh when hearing a joke. «What was the joke?», the savant asked.
Above, I used the words «complicated» and «complex» on purpose. I think university courses in statistics teach you to quantify the complicated. However, when the complicated is replaced by the complex, concentional statistical tools become useless. And so the expression a fool with a tool comes to mind.
Audio is a mix of the complicated and the complex. Which serves as a reminder of when to trust the tools and when to trust experience, intuition and common sense. This is not to say that experienced people guided by intuition is a guaranteed recipee for success.
In another thread I asked people if they were objective oriented or subjective oriented on a scale from 1 to 5 where 5 is the most objective. My answer (on my own question...) is that this scale is meaningless in a dynamic process. When I start to look at a problem, I am a 5, i.e. the most objective. When the problem has been narrowed down using objective criteria, I become more subjective. What is the colour of the cable?
When I meet problems that I have extensive experience with, this is an effortless process where the steps from 5 to 1 (after some back and forth, maybe) is a gradual, not a rules based one. Trying to describe how I work on the different stages would be difficult if I couldn’t use the concept of « statistics» in a broader sense.