My Christmas message

My Christmas message is this: if you are analyzing data don’t discretize a continuous variable *just* because you’re way more familiar with tests and methods for categorical variables than for continuous variables. I’m not saying don’t do it, but don’t do it just for that reason. It’s a bad habit of computing people, I find myself doing it all the time — but others such as economists don’t do it as much. Learn methods that can handle continuous variables and use them. Ho ho ho.