Its one of those debatable stories. I have a very good penguin book called "how to lie with statistics" which is obviously not trying to teach that, its using perverse sarcasm to explain how people do mislead. Things like charts which don't start at zero and magnify the 1% variances between samples into apparently (visually) far bigger things.
On the whole, why we start and stop things is complicated. I chose not to pursue engineer status, after the computer science ethics class discuss the risk side of getting it wrong (therac case, the freeman-fox computation disaster which led to two box-girder bridge collapses, Mismanaged expert systems REI-ifying racial and sexist admissions policy to medical degrees) -But in truth, I was probably unsuited. Its easier to say this was my watershed moment, but there were many reasons including lazyness.
Maybe you were better suited to a life in statistics than you thought?
On the whole, why we start and stop things is complicated. I chose not to pursue engineer status, after the computer science ethics class discuss the risk side of getting it wrong (therac case, the freeman-fox computation disaster which led to two box-girder bridge collapses, Mismanaged expert systems REI-ifying racial and sexist admissions policy to medical degrees) -But in truth, I was probably unsuited. Its easier to say this was my watershed moment, but there were many reasons including lazyness.
Maybe you were better suited to a life in statistics than you thought?