“Ritual statistical magic” is even more genius: Future civilizations will look down on us for believing that statistics were part of science, not not seeing the hand of the cleric in making them up, just like we look down on middle ages for believing anything monks pretended to translate from the Bible, which in fact they made up.

All praise the holly p-value! May the null hypothesis be with you!

Perhaps they will regard our current obsession with machine learning as a sort of Tower of Babel built out of made-up statistics. Or a castle in the sky.

Or as their ancestors?

Many years ago I picked up a book on six sigma. First page was all about how you attack anyone that disagrees with six sigma.

Okay so this is a cult.

Put the book down and spent remaining career avoiding anyplace that mentioned it.

Well there were lots of whips involved: White Belt, Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt and Master Black Belt.