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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Stats is maybe the area of math where non-math (formulas, calculations, derivations) reasoning is the most important:

- Have I unwittingly introduced a bias? Is there a selection taking place that I didn't think about when collecting the data? (Eg calling people on landlines to get polling data.)

- Is there a reason why I should expect the dynamics in the dataset occur in the future, or a reason to expect it to be gone? (Eg does the financial market work like it did before the year 2000?)

- If such-and-such hypothesis is true, what else should I be able to find in the data? (Eg suppose crime is caused by non-aborted kids, what other effects should there be? More truancy in schools?)

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I remember statistics exams where the math is not the problem, but the language is. The way the question was written always caused discussion. At those exams, you could wait till the end, then afterwards the answers were given, and there was always this one guy or girl who had clever questions and could interpret the question differently. Then another answer was possible. As these were multiple choice questions, that made a lot of people happy.

Absolutely. The problem with statistics is not the maths but what it means. I think this is one reason why people become so easily unstuck with statistics, carelessly applying techniques to data without really understanding the assumptions or the subtly of the question being answered by the technique.

It's also the area where non-math reasoning is most frequently wrong.

Examples include, but are not limited to: ignoring prior probabilities (e.g. misuse of p-values), Simpson's paradox, the Monty Hall problem.

I really wish you didn't think of basic reasoning skills as "non-math."

Struggling for a word that means "not what people normally associate with math".

Does non-aborted kids mean something I am not aware of? I mean, every child who is born would be non-aborted, right?

It refers to research, heavily publicized by Freakonomics, which claims that the reduction in crime rates in the US is not because of police interventions etc. but because more people are having abortions and abortions are legal in more states and so fewer people are born in dysfunctional environments that tend to produce more criminal behavior.

He's referencing the book Freakonomics. One thesis there is that higher abortion rates lead to lower crime rates.

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