Rachel’s Reviews > The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics > Status Update

If algorithms are shown a skewed sample of the world, they will reach a skewed conclusion.

Psychologist are increasingly acknowledging the problem of experiments that study only “weird subjects“ that is, Western, Educated, and from Industrialized Rich Democracies.

Missing responses are examples of “dark data“ we know the people are out there and we know they have opinions, but we can only guess what those opinions are. David Hand.

A lobby group seeking to deny the statistical evidence will always be able to point to some aspect of the current science that is not settled, note that the matter is terribly complicated, and call for more research.

Sometimes an advanced degree in statistics would’ve been useful, but you never need it to ask the right questions.

Sometimes the problem is not that we are too eager to believe something, but that we find reasons not to believe anything.

Doubt is easy to sell because it is part of the process of scientific exploration and debate.

Good statistics are like a telescope for an astronomer, a microscope for a bacteriologist, or an x-ray for a radiologist. If we are willing to let them, Good statistics help us see things about the world around us and about ourselves, both large and small that we would not be able to see in any other way.