I think Herman Chernoff and Lincoln Moses defined statistics perfectly on the first page of Chapter 1 of their book Elementary Decision Theory:
Blockquote
…today’s statistician will say that statistics is concerned with decision making in the face of uncertainty.
Decision analysis is woefully neglected in basic stats. Why do we conduct research in medical science other than to make better decisions? It is much easier to test recall of the formula of the standard error than it is to discuss applications of stats to common problems. Even design of experiments can be expressed in decision theoretic terms.