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eel an naked statistics

aker Has Ever Said
Stripping the Dread from the Data
~ Dismal Science

CHARLES WHEELAN

W. W. Norton & Company

New York I London
 Contents

Introduction: Why I hated calculus but love statistics ix

Acknowledgments xvii

What's the Point? 1

2
Descriptive Statistics : Who was the best baseball player of all time? 15
Appendix to Chapter 2 34

3
Deceptive Description: "He's got a great personality!"
and other true but grossly misleading statements 36

4
Correlation: How does Netjlix know what movies I like? 58
Appendix to Chapter 4 65

5
Basic Probability: Don't buy the extended warranty
on your $9 9 printer 68

5%
The Monty Hall Problem 90

6
Problems with Probability: How overconfident math
geeks nearly destroyed the global financial system 95
 viii contents

7
The Importance of Data: "Garbage in, garbage out" 110

8
The Central Limit Theorem: The Lebron James of statistics 127

9
Why I hated c
Inference: Why my statistics professor thought I might have cheated 143
Appendix to Chapter 9 164

10
Polling: How we know that 64 percent ofAmericans
support the death penalty (with a sampling error 3 percent) 169
Appendix to Chapter 10 183

11 have always had an uncom:

Regression Analysis: The miracle elixir 185 like numbers for the sake o

12
Appendix to Chapter 11 208
I formulas that have no real-
high school calculus for the
to tell me why I needed to learJ
Common Regression Mistakes: The mandatory warning label 212 Who cares?
In fact, one of the great 1
13
senior year of high school, at t
Program Evaluation: Will going to Harvard change your life? 225 Placement Calculus. I was woiJ
less prepared for the exam than l
Conclusion: Five questions that statistics can help answer 241 to my first-choice college a fev
what little motivation I had foli
Appendix: Statistical software 257 questions, they looked comple1
having trouble answering the q
Notes ognize what was being asked. I
261
exams, but, to paraphrase Donal
Index know. This exam looked even rr
269
the pages of the exam for a whi
walked to the front of the classr
we'll call Carol Smith, was procl
don't recognize a lot of the stuff