PHIL 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Standard Deviation, Fair Coin, Almost Surely
3 Nov 2015
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Using a university"s alumni donations address list for a survey on past student satisfaction. An e-mail survey measuring people"s level of comfort with technology. Even without a biased sampling technique, we might just get unlucky. Surveying height, we might happen to pick a set of people who are all taller than average or shorter than average. Confidence and margins of error: when we draw (non-deductive) inferences from some set of data, we can only ever be confident in the conclusion to a degree. Significance is a measure of the confidence we are entitled to have in our probabilistic conclusion. It is, however, also a function of how precise a conclusion we are trying to draw: confidence is cheap. In short, a set of data typically permits you to be confident, to a degree, in some statistical conclusion that is precise, to a degree: understanding a statistical claim requires knowing both degrees.
