These are the
great results you can get if you look backwards at brief intervals of data and don't check your results by hypothesizing a causal mechanism, making a prediction, and finding out whether your curves match into the future. For instance, there is an uncanny ten-year correlation between the number of letters in the winning word in the Scripps National Spelling Bee and the number of people killed by venomous spiders.
Along those lines is this claim, made by a female student, that my wife heard in a graduate (!) statistics class: "Whether I have a baby or not is independent of whether my mother has a baby or not."
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
That’s a great example. True today, true for all possible tomorrows; and true yesterday, and for a great many yesterdays that might be in your sample! And yet...
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