How much do you earn in rock music? Whether your answer will be »several million« or »that's breadless art« often has less to do with the question itself than with your own individual distortions and errors in thinking – the statistical noise.
Much has been written about these biases. In everyday life, it is very difficult not to succumb to them because they creep into our decision-making processes completely unnoticed. The term bias is also used in statistics. There, it is the systematic deviation of an estimation procedure that does not deliver the true value on average. At the same time, the term receives less attention here because, on the one hand, the problem is well understood and, on the other, it becomes smaller and smaller as the sample size increases.
The bias is always symbolized by the target, where the cloud of points of the bullet holes systematically deviates from the black center. See also our blog post »Of Trembling Shooters« [only available in German].
In his book »Noise: What distorts our decisions – and how we can improve them«, Nobel Prize-winning economist Kahnemann turns his attention to the other side of the target. In statistics, we would say he wants to understand the standard deviation or dispersion more precisely.
In the new episode with Esther Packullat, our blogging statistics experts Dr. Sascha Feth and Dr. Jochen Fiedler discuss what can be gained by dissecting scatter and why this should be done much more often in medicine, loans or in court.
In passing, we learn why the data basis of the »Healy« is so heavily affected by bias that such studies can be thrown straight into the garbage can without any chance of correction. All this and much more in the new »Streuspanne« episode!
Book Tip: »Noise. What Distorts Our Decisions – And How We Can Improve Them« by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein
»Streuspanne« blog post »Of Trembling Shooters« [only available in German]
»Streuspanne« podcast episode »Statistics Prove – Parapsychology Is (Not) Humbug. About Parapsychological Studies and Their Curious Discoveries«
German ZEIT article on the new resolution of the UN Human Rights Council »Artificial Intelligence Can Discriminate«
German Spiegel cover story »The End of Macho Medicine«
Book tip: »Invisible Women – How a World Dominated by Data Ignores Half the Population« by Caroline Criado-Perez
Have you discovered a numerical phenomenon that you would like us to discuss or read a statistic in the media and would like us to make it a topic in the »Streuspanne«? Then get in touch with us.
The podcast is only available in German.
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Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM