Before covering p-values and why they are so problematic, I thought it would be a good idea to provide a bit of a recap of Uncertainty Wednesday. I have been writing this series for almost two years now, beginning summer of 2016. Uncertainty is everywhere in the world and yet we are generally poorly equipped to reason about it. That happens to be true even for people, like myself, who have studied some probability and statistics. My approach in Uncertainty Wednesday has been to consider that ...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I used meteorite impact data to make the point that sample variance may be much smaller than actual variance. Following the post, I was asked a great question on Twitter: “Is there such thing as estimation error on sample variance?” The answer is yes. Just as we saw earlier that the sample mean has a distribution, so does the sample variance. If you have different samples, you will get different variances and those will form a distribution. We are thus faced with e...

The last few weeks in Uncertainty Wednesday, with the exception of my net neutrality post, we have been looking at the relationship between sample data and distributions. Today is a bit of a recap so that we know where we are. One of the reasons for writing this series is that in the past I have found that it is super easy to get into lots of detail on mechanics and in the process lose sight of how everything hangs together. So now is a good time to remind ourselves of the fundamental framewo...