stats-2
Explanation
This comic is about the tension between traditional expertise and data-driven approaches. In the first panel, a woman announces that there is no more need for subjective experience or intuition because you can now take all knowledge, process it, and get the power of a supercomputer's statistical analysis. A man angrily objects that the internet will still rely on human expertise, and people won't simply defer to statistical outputs over those who came before.
In the final panel, set "later," the same man is shown watching something on a screen. He remarks, "Huh, why is tonight different from all other nights?" — and the answer comes: "Tonight we have masturbation statistics." This is a reference to the Passover Seder question ("Why is this night different from all other nights?"), repurposed to suggest that even this man, who defended traditional human knowledge, has been seduced by the novelty of data — specifically, trivial and voyeuristic data.
The joke is that while people may claim to value traditional expertise and resist the allure of big data, in practice everyone (including the skeptics) gets drawn in by the availability of fascinating, often lowbrow statistics. The comic satirizes how data culture wins not through superior wisdom but through sheer curiosity appeal.