Statistics

(c) 2017 by Barton Paul Levenson

When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of the meager and unsatisfactory kind.

--William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

We've all heard there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Some people say Mark Twain said it. Some say Benjamin Disraeli. Some people think with statistics you can prove anything; that using statistics is a fundamentally dishonest way to argue.

This is a horrible mistake. Yes, statistics can be used dishonestly. "79% of sexy actors love Ultra-Blight toothpaste!" Maybe they do, but who says sexy actors' opinions are any better than yours?

This is not how statistics were meant to be used. It is an important branch of mathematics, used in every science. In fact--and I will emphasize this, because it matters:

Statistics used honestly are a tremendously powerful way to probe reality.

Statistics is a huge field. Fortunately, we don't have to know all of it, or even most of it, to know some very useful things. This tutorial is not a comprehensive course in statistics. But it will get you up to speed fast if you have to investigate some issue.

Click below to learn about the following topics.

Using only these methods, and explaining some of the concepts behind them, we will have a powerful tool to analyze scientific issues, economic issues, public policy issues, or anything else we can put numbers to.