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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (301094)	5/31/2016 5:18:45 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 540724

If it were up to me, I'd make deep understanding of statistics mandatory and I would make it part of education starting grade 1. Lack of appreciation of statistics does untold damage to the society in everything from politics to patient diagnosis. And unfortunately many educated and intelligent people lack sufficient understanding to make it work. Things don't have to "simple" to conform to Normal distribution. In fact, the object under the study itself doesn't have to be part of a normal distribution itself in order for the property being studied to be normally distributed. For example, a purple car is not normally distributed. But if you were to make measurements of the neighboring color pigments on that car, the variation of those color shade are normally distributed. Human abilities and intelligence are normally distributed (or at least fairly close to it). This doesn't mean that humans or their brains are necessarily normally distributed - just car shades are not normally distributed from all the possible colors and a purple car is certainly an outlier, yet the neighboring shades are normal. Now for some life saving and scary exercise: Suppose there is a rare but deadly disease X that affects one in 1 million people. There is a test and if you have X it will catch it 99.9% of the times. And it gives a false positive in 0.1% of the times. You get the news that your test came positive. What are the chances that you have X? Don't feel bad if you guess wrong - sadly over 80% of the doctors also could not interpret the test properly either! ST PS The answer is there is a 1 in 1000 chances of you have X given the positive test results...it's a lot less scary interpretation of the test, isn't it?