More specifically, I am one of the authors of this paper. I was primarily involved in the assembly of the synthetic genome. I will answer your questions to the best of my ability, and to the extent of which I am allowed to discuss these things.
Granted, thinking statistically is tricky. We like to construct simple cause-and-effect stories to explain the world as we experience it. “You need to train in this way of thinking. It’s not easy,” says John Allen Paulos, a Temple University mathematician.
That’s precisely the point. We often say, rightly, that literacy is crucial to public life: If you can’t write, you can’t think. The same is now true in math. Statistics is the new grammar.
Whenever I hear "I'm not good at math", it's like people telling me "I can't read, and it's ok."
