A very small rebellion

We have a statistics joke, but it's not significant.

(Give it a second.)

It turns out scientists collect these. Statistics has an entire genre: a statistician's spouse left them for an engineer, citing a lack of confidence intervals. Three statisticians go hunting, spot a deer — the first misses ten metres left, the second misses ten metres right, and the third shouts "we got it!" The Bayesian and the frequentist walk into a bar; prior to that, the Bayesian had no idea.

These are barely jokes. They are inside ones, told to an audience that has stayed up too late running regressions. They require you to have been there. That is exactly why we like them.

Humour in science is a small rebellion against the seriousness of the work. The stakes are real — brains, lives, recoveries — and the tools are precise, and the reviewers are merciless. The jokes let some air in. They say: we take this seriously, and we are people.

The companies we want to build near are the ones whose group chats are full of bad puns about conference deadlines and worse puns about Reviewer 2. Good science is done by people who laugh at their own field.

So. We have a statistics joke. It's not significant.

But it is ours.