Institutional Authority and Communication in Stats

It takes a great amount of power to get to know SAS

Another early morning, and my brain was hitting a wall. I had no idea why mastering this software was so difficult. My knowledge of statistics was among the best in the class, and I enjoyed the subject. The constant wall-banging that SAS brought to my door was less enjoyable.

SAS made me sad. The system was designed to be a statistician's friend but, like an expired microwave burrito, gave you much more pain than satisfaction. The software is unintuitive, clunky, and not designed for statisticians. The price tag on it was no laughing matter either: for that price, I could have easily doubled my fleet of Lego spaceships. The system had been designed before the computer that would one day host it, and had aged just as well as the phonograph. My career was riding on the back of a long dead dinosaur.

I stared at the keyboard again. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out the homework. The task was a simple one: load a program. I had been doing it on Microsoft Word for years. Yet, this stubbornly unmoving program did nothing for me.

To make things worse, I was learning how to use R at the same time. I like R. R is the friend whose interests are written on his sleeves. R is the roommate who understands that he needs to do his dishes before the girl you like comes over, and then offers to do a little more. The software on R was much more intuitive than on SAS, and the program was free, to boot. While we were still learning how to read files on SAS, we had already learned how to get our data to do cartwheels in R.

I flipped the SAS manual open again. The thing cut off the blood circulation on whatever knee I balanced it on, and it took a good few days to find the correct page, but it was my only hope. Surely, I thought, SAS could do at least one update per decade. I wouldn't have minded if SAS was not regulation equipment for every statistician. Little brother R was superior in every way, and the reminders of that fact were frequent and painful. With a bit of resignation in my heart, I packed my bag and made my way to the TA's to relearn the very fundamentals of an unfixed system perpetuated by another, nearly unfixable system.