While chasing down a reference, I came across this paper:
David S. Moore (1993) “A Generation of Statistics Education: An Interview with Frederick Mosteller”, Journal of Statistics Education, 1:1, DOI: 10.1080/10691898.1993.11910453
It is an interview with Frederick Mosteller from the end of 1992.
The contents is particularly interesting in contrast to the path that led me to it. With some friends, I’m in the process of rewriting a statistics textbook. Our book cites Mosteller’s famous introductory textbook:
Frederick Mosteller, R. E. K. Rourke, and G. B. Thomas, Jr. (1970) “Probability with Statistical Applications”, Second edition. Addison-Wesley.
I was interested in the textbook, because it takes the opposite approach to the one that I am tempted by. Specifically, as the title implies, the book starts with the mathematics of probability and then goes on apply this mathematics to statistical problems.
It turns out, Mosteller had changed his mind about the probability-first approach to introductory statistics:
The history of that [change in approach] is, of course, a little complicated. I came to Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations. And there I met many graduate students in anthropology, clinical and social psychology, and sociology and came up against dozens and dozens of practical problems. At the same time, I was also working with Dr. Henry Beecher, an anesthesiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, on problems of anesthetics and analgesics. Consequently, I was heavily data-oriented, both in the social and medical sciences at that time, and I had had a great deal of experience in data analysis during the war. I found that the students were really not very interested in the logic of statistical analysis. They were eager to get their hands on tools that would help them solve the problems that they had with their doctoral or undergraduate dissertations. Most of them had concrete problems, most of them had data problems, and they were eager to use statistics to solve their own problems. They were not very interested in knowing how somebody invented a statistical device, nor did they care to have it proved to them personally that the method was appropriate or worked. They were rather eager to get on with doing the analysis and trying to interpret it, and then bringing it back to patients or theory of social science, or anthropology, or whatever it might be.
…
So, in the classroom as opposed to in the writing of the textbook you speak of, I found that the students I was teaching didn’t have much interest in the underpinnings that we in math departments often found very valuable. So I got to thinking that there might be a way to teach a course in statistics using primarily data.
There is a lovely sign-off to the interview:
[Interviewer] — If I can be a bit unfair, let me put one concluding question. If you had one short word of advice to offer to teachers of statistics less experienced than yourself, what would it be?
[Mosteller] — Be sure to keep plenty of concrete examples in your teaching. And if you can hear a pin drop in your classroom, nobody’s following the lecture (laughter).