Tag Archives: statistics

Falling branches: the illusion of miraculous divine intervention

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Fallacy Man

Human beings like to have explanations for everything, and we find seemingly inexplicable events extremely troubling. We disdain the notion that some things just happen without any rhyme or reason for them. This dependency on meaningful events makes us prone … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Basic Statistics Part 3: The Dangers of Large Data Sets: A Tale of P values, Error Rates, and Bonferroni Corrections

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Fallacy Man

In previous posts, I have explained the importance of having lots of data, but what I failed to mention was the dangers of analyzing these large data sets. You see, all real data has variation in it, and when you … Continue reading →

Posted in Nature of Science | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Basic Statistics Part 2: Correlation vs. Causation

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Fallacy Man

Updated with additional sources on 16-June-16 It is fairly widely known that correlation does not inherently indicate causation. In fact, inappropriately asserting causation is a logical fallacy known simply as a correlation fallacy. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of … Continue reading →

Posted in Nature of Science | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Basic Statistics Part 1: The Law of Large Numbers

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Fallacy Man

Statistics are a fundamental and vital component of science, and a good grasp of statistics is absolutely essentially if you want to be able to understand scientific results. Nevertheless, the vast majority of people have little or no knowledge of … Continue reading →

Posted in Nature of Science | Tagged , | Comments Off on Basic Statistics Part 1: The Law of Large Numbers