Here is an image to help understand the work of a statistician…
A potter who produces a good, new, useful and often beautiful shape from a lump of clay. Modelling is like finding an interpretation and making a latent structure intelligible.
The potter’s intelligence is in his head and hands, he sees and feels a shape in a raw material…
The intelligence we seek and cultivate is similar. It’s that type of intelligence which allows us to identify “important” information and to draw it out into a useful shape, within an enormous mass of data. Information, in short, is an amphora which is…
Well-made (it has a defined and comprehensible shape), new (it tells us something we didn’t know), useful (it triggers off precise actions which produce wealth and a measurable added value) and often beautiful (if we have done our job well, it is “exactly how we wanted it”).