5 Stories to Rewire Your Statistical Intuition with Ishan Goel

Hi TLCers!

I had the great pleasure to be introduced to Ishan Goel, founder of the Thinking Bell, after his most recent win from Guess the Test for Best Educational Content. Based on what I saw, I immediately reached out and asked Ishan to come do a stats intuition talk for the TLC. Thankfully, he agreed.

Description

Working with various problems in stats over the past 10 years, I have been led to a few key ideas that make statistics counterintuitive to common sense.

I believe most aspects of experimental statistics flow from these five key ideas.

1️⃣ How you sample your data decides what biases infect your perspective.

2️⃣ Averages hide beneath them a lot more than they show.

3️⃣ Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

4️⃣ One of the two: false positives or false negatives, is always more costly than the other.

5️⃣ And finally, getting a winner by chance is not equal to the chance a winner is false.

In this talk, I want to share one story for each of these ideas so that they make space in your mind. And from what I have realised, these ideas ferment over time. 

Over time, they make you ask questions that lead you to design better experiments, identify false winners, and rescue missed insights from past experiments.

If you are someone who would want their decisions to be right more often than they currently are, make sure to join this talk because it will change the way you think about uncertainty.

Title: 5 Stories to Rewire Your Statistical Intuition

Assumptions, equations, and Greek alphabets. Statistics has been taught the wrong way for a very long time. 

Experimenters don’t need to calculate probabilities or memorise the algorithms. A tool or a data scientist can handle that for you. What your entire team needs is an intuitive understanding of how uncertainty behaves in the real world and why insights from data are more slippery than we think. 

In this talk, I am sharing five stories that will question your inferences and give you a new lens to think about data. You will learn to ask the right questions that will lead you to find faulty winners and rescue missed insights.

This is not a lecture on statistics. It is a discussion to change how you think about uncertainty.

Join the conversation with Ishan, Jul 31

8 AM Pacific | 9 AM Mountain | 10 AM Central | 11 AM Eastern | 8:30 PM Delhi

*Zoom details will be shared on the TLC Slack community on the day of the event!

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