Distributions in everyday life
Supplemented by Steve Hsu, a rant on how few people get the training to really understand distributions, which are increasingly important in everyday life.
This reminds me of my foray into tagging, where I had to dust off my own understanding of distributions. On the one hand, the fact is that the topic can just be plain hard, and at times pretty counterintuitive. On the other, I’m sure that numbers themselves seemed hard until they became part of almost everything we do.
One point that seems like a good one: it’s true that statistics are essential to understanding things like news reports, Google Analytics, sales dashboards, sports stats, etc., and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for this fact to be reflected in school curriculums.