Fecundity | Independent, evidence-based inquiry

How to Scrutinize a Statistic

January 18, 2022
16,397 words (~81 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics second-person

If you inquire into any issue you care about, you encounter statistics. This article is a primer for the practice of scrutinizing these statistics. It describes what sort of questions you should ask of a statistic, such as those pertaining to its provenance, its scope of inference, its practical significance, and when applicable, the estimation error associated with the statistic. Common fallacies in the presentation or interpretation of statistics are identified throughout the article, and no prerequisites are expected beyond mathematics at the secondary school level.

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fallacies (5)
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About

My name is Joshua Born. I am an M.S.-level statistician and amateur social scientist. I would have liked to have been a professional scientist, but for many years I worked a previous career as a software developer, tried out different things, etc. etc., and life passed me by.

This blog is an outlet for me to explore my own interests in my personal time, including research interests. Most of my research interests pertain to contraception, alloparenting, and abortion. I also write about fallacies in how people think about social issues.