I wish that guy had been my statistics teacher. Most statistics teachers seem to revel in giving their students a brain freeze with terms like standard deviation, standard error, mode, mean, null-hypothesis, z-scores, normal distribution, chi-square, confidence intervals, degrees of freedom, and so forth.
Nowhere is the old quip that there are "Lies, damn lies, and statistics" better displayed than in a political campaign.
Here are two different statistical concepts I found in Wikipedia. Tell me which one is the more understandable.
the chi-squared distribution with k degrees of freedom is the distribution of a sum of the squares of k independent standard normal random variables. It is one of the most widely used probability distributions in inferential statistics, e.g., in hypothesis testing or in construction of confidence intervals en.wikipedia.org
"Standard deviation is a widely used measure of variability or diversity used in statistics and probability theory. It shows how much variation or "dispersion" exists from the average (mean, or expected value). A low standard deviation indicates that the data points tend to be very close to the mean, whereas high standard deviation indicates that the data points are spread out over a large range of values." en.wikipedia.org
Example of two sample populations with the same mean and different standard deviations. Red population has mean 100 and SD 10; blue population has mean 100 and SD 50.
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