Death to the textbook!

It will be argued that, at the introductory level at least, the Internet has rendered the statistics textbook redundant. This is because textbooks are inevitably out-of-date, often ossifying techniques rather than investigating fundamental concepts, especially those which continue to excite controversy to this day; these include Bayes’ theorem and the competing merits of significance testing and of confidence levels. The author will cite evidence from the library of his own former university, and outline his plans for a Statistics Vademecum. This will not be a textbook, but rather series of questions which direct the reader to look up concepts on the internet and answer Socratic-style questions about them.. The vision is that the reader should arrive at an informed opinion on the cliché ‘lies, damned lies....’, and appreciate that is neither mathematics nor IT, but rather logic that presents the challenge in understanding statistics .