I’ve been enjoying William Cleveland’s The Elements of Graphing Data, a book I wish I’d discovered years ago. The following sentence jumped out at me:
No complete prescription can be designed to allow us to proceed mechanically and to relieve us of thinking hard. (p. 59)
The context was — well, it doesn’t matter what the context was. It’s a great encapsulation of what statistical teaching, mentoring, and consulting should be (teaching how to think hard) and cannot be (mechanical prescriptions).
The Hardest Science 