Podcast highlights

Recently, I made a podcast for Ryan Ray, which you can access here. The link sends you to a 14-day free trial to his newsletter, which is where he publishes his podcasts.

Ryan contacted me after he read my book Numbers Rule Your World (link). I was happy to learn that he enjoyed the stories, and during the podcast, he gave an example of how he applied the statistical concepts to other situations.

During the podcast, you will hear:

• I have a line in my course syllabus that reads "after you take this class, you will not be able to look at numbers (in the media) with a straight face ever again." That's a goal of mine. And it also applies to my books.
  
  
• Why are most statisticians skeptics
  
  
• Figuring out the statistical conclusions is the easy part while the hardest challenge is to find a way to communicate them to a non-technical audience. I went through many drafts before I landed on the precise language used in those stories.
  
  
• Why "correlation is not causation" is not useful practical advice
• You can't unsee something you've already seen, and this creates hindsight bias
• The biggest bang for the buck when improving statistical models is improving data quality
  
  
• Some models, such as polls and election forecasts, can be thought of as thermometers measuring the mood of the respondents at the time of polling.

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To hear the podcast, visit Ryan Ray's website.

Comments

[Ryan]

Thanks for coming on!