you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Alan_Crowe 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Learning statistics is hard.

It is probably worth learning some computer programing first. Then you can write code to generate synthetic data. And more code to analyze it. For example, generate some data from a distribution with a known mean. Average your data to estimate the mean. Notice that your average still wobbles about a bit, less than the data, less still if you generate lots of synthetic data points.

When your statistics book starts talking about the variance of an estimator, you've already seen it when you played with your short computer programs. The text book author is talking about the way the average still wobbles a bit, even with lots of data. But you've seen what he is on about, so it is easier to understand.

[–]NuclearBadger 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Stats are gay. When I see an ad for anything and it says 70% of women agree. I want to know what the 30% thought was shit.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

That gay stat usually means the sample was biased. For example, are the women in the study just agreeing with what the researchers asked to be polite? Are the women just sampled among those who have a strong opinion?

Statistics is useful for AI. That most statistics mislead is because statistics are used by corporations and governments to persuade. Normies cannot look at data with a skeptical mind.

[–]NuclearBadger 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeh, you could survey 10000 people, and then choose 10 of those to make 9 out of 10 people agree, when in reality 9991 disagree, but you're technically not lying.