Stats professor: reading one textbook cover to cover puts you ahead of 99% of people

johnowhitaker · x · 2026-09-22

A learning anecdote circulating on X: someone wanted to learn statistics, asked how, and was told to just read Statistical Inference and solve the problems. A stats professor remarked they'd never seen anyone outside a PhD program actually do that. The retweeter adds that reading one textbook cover to cover instantly puts you in the 99th percentile of the general population — and multiple textbooks make you "dangerous."

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