Statisticians
The Statisticians are a Methodology of Iteration X focused on forecasting and modeling future events.
They focus on the Spheres of Entropy and Time.
History
The Statisticians claim to be the oldest methodology of their convention. Tracing their roots back to the ancient Greeks and Chinese thinkers who first codified their observations of nature into a system from which similar phenomena could also be classified, the Statisticians seek to unravel all that is unknown and fit it into their schemata.
Few Statisticians made it into history books because it's difficult to hide one’s advantages in prediction and modeling from the Sleeper. It's more than possible that stories about great seers and their fantastic methods of throwing bones and other objects, writing strange languages, and putting together extremely complex astrological charts were, in fact, confounded tales of early Statisticians and not actually stories about soothsayers and witches. From the vague accounts of their abilities and methods it can be hard to say, but the power to tell the future by studying strange, obscure patterns certainly sounds like the modus operandi of the Statisticians.
The Statisticians claim the invention of multiple calendars as their own, as a way to channel and control the previously uncontrolled and often contradictory flow of time. Their predictive modelling has foreseen numerous technological advancements that were later implemented by the Time Table, ranging from the theory of the earth ellipsoid to the image of the human brain as a computer.
At the turn of the millenium, the Statisticians predicted a 75% chance of a global disaster in which the Masses would destroy themselves over the course of 10 years. With the loss of Autochthonia and its highest personell in the wake of the Reckoning, the remaining Statisticians focus on the tools they have at hand.
Culture
The Statisticians are often stereotyped as a "mission control" of the activities of other Iterators. Their critics claim that the approach is fundamentally flawed. Human behaviour and chance cannot be quantified and their directives harm an individual agents' ability to react with initiative and ingenuity. To counter that, the Statisticians often send people into field work to collect the data they analyze and not relying on second-hand infos.
In contrast to the other Methodologies of Iteration X, which often focus on hard sciences, Statisticians recruit themselves often from soft sciences. Sociology, anthropology, economics and political science, as well as mathematics are favored fields of research. The methodology understands that a broad spectrum of knowledge is needed for their projects and encourages cross-specializations and multi-focus.
The Statisticians also have the task of keeping their Convention clean of infiltration, particularly from Nephandi and Infernalists. Using only deductive reasoning and not relying on spheres for this work, Statisticians have proven themselves hard to be fooled.
