A while ago I read that a betting firm rather hires physics or math people than people with degrees in statistics because the statistics folks to often think that real world data is supposed to follow a normal distribution like the textbook example they faced in university.
Outside of specific statistics programs a lot of times statistics classes lead to students simply memorizing recipes and not really developing a good statistical intuition.
Teaching statistics sounds often much better in the abstract than in practice.
That's a good point, but on the other hand, even thinking that everything is a Gaussian would be a vast improvement over thinking that everything is a Dirac delta and it is therefore not ludicrous to speculate about why some politician's approval rating went down from 42.8% last week to 42.3% today when both figures come from surveys with a sample size of 1600.
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