Statistical Thinking

Statistics for people in a hurry

Cassie Kozyrkov Follow 8 min read · Apr 8, 2025 27 Listen Share If you prefer an 🎧audio🎧 version,here’s one** read for you by the author.** Ever wished someone would just tell you what the point of statistics is and what the jargon means in plain English? Let me try to grant that wish for you! I’ll zoom through all the biggest ideas in statistics in 8 minutes! Or just 1 minute, if you stick to the large font bits. Press enter or click to view image in full size What’s a statistic? It’s any old way of mushing up our data. Yup. 100% technically correct definition. Now let’s see what the discipline of statistics is all about.

Statistics is the science of changing your mind. Making decisions based on facts (parameters) is hard enough as it is, but -curses!- sometimes we don’t even have the facts we need. Instead, what we know (our sample) is different from what we wish we knew (our population). That’s what it means to have uncertainty. **Statistics **is the science of changing your mind under uncertainty. What might your mind be set to? A default action …

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Written by Cassie Kozyrkov

179K followers ·4 following CEO, Kozyr. Former Chief Decision Scientist, Google. ❤️ Stats, ML/AI, data, puns, art, theatre, decision science. All views are my own. decision.substack.com Follow Help Status About Careers Press Blog Store Privacy Rules Terms Text to speech