statistics | Born Inquisitive

The Fallacy of Generic Thinking

March 4, 2022
5,531 words (~27 minutes) Tags: opinion fallacies statistics psychology philosophy third-person

Generic thinking is unquantified belief about large populations of individuals, a profound and terribly mistaken fallacy that has little use other than prejudice.

How to Scrutinize a Statistic

January 18, 2022
16,214 words (~81 minutes) Tags: opinion fallacies statistics second-person

When encountering a statistic, you should inquire about its provenance, its scope of inference, its practical significance, and the estimation error associated with it.

Anecdotes Are Not Evidence

January 31, 2021
7,817 words (~39 minutes) Tags: opinion fallacies statistics psychology third-person

Anecdotal evidence has flaws that make it useless for inferences about populations or about cause and effect. Valid uses of anecdotes exist, but anecdotes should be scrutinized even in such cases.

Selection Bias and the Fallacy of Listing Examples

December 7, 2020
3,320 words (~16 minutes) Tags: opinion fallacies statistics third-person

Advocating a belief by finding supporting examples and listing them is fallacious because of selection bias; examples are selected because they illustrate the belief and contradictory cases are ignored.

Archive

January 2023

Essentialism

December 2022

Study Enough Philosophy to Know Not to Study Philosophy

July 2022

Top Four Needs for Future Contraceptive Technology

June 2022

April 2022

Use of Contraception in the United States Reported in the 2017-2019 National Survey of Family Growth

March 2022

The Fallacy of Generic Thinking

January 2022

November 2021

Category-Based Prejudice

January 2021

Anecdotes Are Not Evidence

December 2020

July 2020

Political Rhetoric as Shibboleths

November 2018

Margaret Sanger on Abortion in Her Own Words

About

My name is Joshua Born. I am a professional survey statistician and amateur social scientist.

This blog is an outlet for me to explore my own interests in my personal time, including research interests. Most of my research interests pertain to what I have termed "reproductive responsibility," which focuses on the study of contraception and occasionally touches on related topics.

Disclaimer

The findings and opinions expressed in this blog are solely the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of any of the author's employers or clients. Additionally, conclusions based entirely or in part from data from named sources, such as government statistical agencies or private think tanks, do not necessarily represent the views of the sources of the data.