Simpson's Paradox
Thanks to https://brilliant.org/minutephysics for sponsoring this video! This video is about Simpson's paradox, a statistical paradox and ecological fallacy where seemingly contradictory results...
==========
We often evaluate the success of medical treatments or social programs by how much of the populationthey help.Like, suppose we're treating a disease that afflicts both people and cats, and among 1cat and 4 people we treat, the cat and 1 person recover and 3 people die.And of 4 cats and 1 person we don't treat, three of the cats recover while the personand 1 cat die.In the real world, these numbers might be more like 300 and 100, or whatever, but we'llkeep them small so they're easier to keep track of.So, in our sample, 100% of treated cats survive while only 75% of untreated cats do, and 25%of treated humans survive while 0% of untreated humans do.Which makes it seem like the treatment improves chances of recovery.Except that if we a...
==========
We often evaluate the success of medical treatments or social programs by how much of the populationthey help.Like, suppose we're treating a disease that afflicts both people and cats, and among 1cat and 4 people we treat, the cat and 1 person recover and 3 people die.And of 4 cats and 1 person we don't treat, three of the cats recover while the personand 1 cat die.In the real world, these numbers might be more like 300 and 100, or whatever, but we'llkeep them small so they're easier to keep track of.So, in our sample, 100% of treated cats survive while only 75% of untreated cats do, and 25%of treated humans survive while 0% of untreated humans do.Which makes it seem like the treatment improves chances of recovery.Except that if we a...
