You don't have to be on the internet for long to see:
- "Polls are useless, they only sampled a few thousand people"
- "Why do we need the crime figures adjusted for the age/income/etc groups? Just gimme the raw truth!"
Have to say, I think stats are the least well taught area in the math curriculum. Most people by far have no clue what Simpson's or Berkson's paradoxes are. Most people do not have the critical sense when presented with stats to ask questions like "how was the data collected" or "does it show what we think it shows".
I just don't see it, tough ironically I don't have stats to back it up.
You don't have to be on the Internet long to see flat-earthers or any number of asinine ways of thinking. You can't stretch discrete observations from a supremely massive sample size into "most people".
Gee, if only there was some kind of rigorous and well understood process for determining how to transform discrete observations according to how representative they are, such that we could build a model for a larger population.
Something like that would be very useful for political decision, so perhaps we could name it after the latin word for "of the state"…
Also, etymonline makes a pretty convincing case that statisticum refers to the behavior of administrators, not to the concept of the administration, with the -ist- specifically indicating a person.
- "Polls are useless, they only sampled a few thousand people"
- "Why do we need the crime figures adjusted for the age/income/etc groups? Just gimme the raw truth!"
Have to say, I think stats are the least well taught area in the math curriculum. Most people by far have no clue what Simpson's or Berkson's paradoxes are. Most people do not have the critical sense when presented with stats to ask questions like "how was the data collected" or "does it show what we think it shows".
I just don't see it, tough ironically I don't have stats to back it up.