I appreciate intellectually that so much of our foundational understanding of Statistics (and its core formulas and vocabulary) originates from mathematicians such as Boole, Pascal, Bayes, and others that thought that through probabilities they could find their God. Of all of the maths there is none that its history is so collectively tied up into Christian notions of the search for God and especially 18th Century Gnostic/Pseudo-Gnosticism ideas of Christian morality and ethics.

It has always struck me as somewhat funny in counterpoint that Einstein's alleged gut reaction to early Quantum Mechanics was "God does not play dice with the universe" given how many such mathematicians studied dice precisely with the idea of trying to find their God. There was a lot of nuance in Einstein's actual public reaction to Quantum Mechanics from which that paraphrased quote is often pulled out of context, and I think it speaks to a heart of the contradiction in the heart of Statistics as a theological field: "many of the same early Statisticians hoping to find their God among the probabilities were often morally opposed to gambling and casinos and thought those to be possibly tools of their Devil". Einstein seemed to grapple with that instinct that "physical laws" that revolved around luck seemed morally more associated with demons than a Just God.

I don't know if Statistics can ever find a god among the numbers, but I have no doubt that in this Age of Vastly Applied Sparkling Statistics we keep finding all sorts of new demons and monsters. To be fair, most of these demons seem to be "soylent": at the end of the day they still seem to be made of people (plagiarized from our collective worst qualities). But overall they still seem to be demons in the worst moral and ethical sense and we should maybe be fighting against them rather than let them consume the internet. It doesn't take a grand sense of irony to wonder if the science intended to prove the number of Angels that can dance on the head of pin might instead be much better at finding all the demons in the world, given enough computation (big enough casinos).

I do sometimes worry about the existential horror that so many of our story traditions warn us to beware of magic mirrors and portals to the fairy/demo/spirit realms, and yet here we are in a time where almost all of us just casually carry a magic mirror in our pockets and handbags at all times with its near instantaneous access to the internet which sometimes seems a far larger, more deeply connected fairy realm than even those stories warned us about.

Philosophers in the 1970s worried that with the rapid progression of technology an increasing number of people might have to grapple with "future shock" of living in the future, I think from this perspective we've proven that we've successfully "boiled the frog" versus those 1970s fears (for better and worse) and today's "normal" doesn't look anything like "future shock", rather it's just "normal"/pedestrian/mundane. Everyone has a phone, it connects wirelessly to the largest network of inter-connected computers in history, most people use it pass around photos of cats and complain about restaurants, and don't notice any weird significance to that or all the "future technologies" it takes to make it all work. It's simple magic that lives in their pockets and handbags.

I don't know what to do with that subtle horror realization that maybe we've built the kind of fairy realm that our myths and legends and fairy tales warned us about and almost everyone today just thinks it is a normal feature of the world. I mostly just try to cope with it, and try my best professionally to bring what morality and ethics skills I can to the small bits of the overall fairy realm that I'm paid to work on.