{"id":6650,"date":"2021-03-15T12:26:49","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T16:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/?p=6650"},"modified":"2021-03-15T12:29:36","modified_gmt":"2021-03-15T16:29:36","slug":"3-16-21-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/2021\/03\/15\/3-16-21-post\/","title":{"rendered":"3-16-21 Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

My main takeaway from this week’s podcast and reading is that statistics are extremely powerful and can be used in a variety of ways. Most importantly, statistics matter in regards to history. My mind often gravitates to sports when I hear the word statistics, so the chart I chose for this week’s post is of course about sports. Before we get into the chart, the second most important lesson I learned was that presentation matters. Going back to the 25% chance of winning vs 1\/4 chance winning analogy, this also happens when comparing athletes to one another. Ultimately, as we saw from the reading, statistics can be used to lie not just to others but ourselves.<\/p>\n

The chart below is from January of 2020 and needs to be updated as Ovechkin has scored many more goals since then. The point is that looking at this chart can be deceptive. On one hand, we can see Wayne Gretzky\u2019s \u201cunbeatable\u201d NHL goal record. Comparing him to Ovechkin it\u2019s easy to assume that Gretzky’s record is unbeatable. However, if the chart was displayed in a way that showed how many goals Ovechkin needs to score vs. how many he actually has, people would be more optimistic that Ovechkin could break the record. In reality, just like the 25% vs 1\/4 chance example, these two thoughts are the same thing. This chart helps emphasize that presentation matters when discussing statistics, especially when comparing statistics from two separate time periods.\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My main takeaway from this week’s podcast and reading is that statistics are extremely powerful and can be used in a variety of ways. Most importantly, statistics matter in regards to history. My mind often gravitates to sports when I hear the word statistics, so the chart I chose for this week’s post is of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4691,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4691"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6650"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6659,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6650\/revisions\/6659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}