Comments | leora: It'd be nice if people understood statistics

leora

It'd be nice if people understood statistics

Aug 14, 2011 00:16

So, I have read a fair bit about how more urban areas tend to pay more in taxes than they get back in taxes and rural areas tend to be the reverse. Urban areas tend to need to support rural areas. Now, I don't think rural areas should be forced to cope with all of their expenses on their own, and I think cutting them off from the rest of the world ( Read more... )

beliefs, values, personal

Comments 2

Cue Jon... beth_leonard August 15 2011, 04:45:02 UTC

I'll just cue Jon here to talk about baseball players A and B, and how well they do after one year and two years of play.

Stats is hard. And it's often taught in math departments with little thought to usage cases. I've heard of some universities splitting out their stats department from their math department because the mindset for teaching each well to the intended audience is so different. They are starting to teach stats in some high schools as an alternative 4th year of math instead of calculus, but it's still not being taught that well for people to get an *understanding* of what you can and can't know from the stats.

--Beth

Re: Cue Jon... leora August 15 2011, 05:10:27 UTC

It really is as different from math as science is. That is, it uses math, and knowing some math is important, but there's a lot more to it. And I'd much rather people have an understanding of interpreting stats and experimental design (which is much less math-focused but very important for many real world applications) than that they know how to calculate various statistics. I don't remember how to calculate most statistics, but I do remember how to think about whether the population of a study is representative of the population that I care about applying the statistic to. And so forth. I think a lot of people would get more practical use from that than they do from some other options, certainly compared to calculus. I don't mean to belittle calculus, because it can be very useful if you are doing certain kinds of things, but most people aren't doing those things. Pretty much everyone is exposed to information about studies and needs to make decisions about what that means for what medicine they should consider, what food they should ( ... )