“Ritual statistical magic” is even more genius: Future civilizations will look down on us for believing that statistics were part of science, not not seeing the hand of the cleric in making them up, just like we look down on middle ages for believing anything monks pretended to translate from the Bible, which in fact they made up.
Perhaps they will regard our current obsession with machine learning as a sort of Tower of Babel built out of made-up statistics. Or a castle in the sky.
