Statistics110@Harvard: Clarity•Honesty•Words•Practices: MATH=LOGIC OF CERTAINTY and STATISTICS=LOGIC OF UNCERTAINTIES
Statistics 110 of Harvard University:
Math is the logic of certainty, Statistics is the logic of uncertainty.
quantifying uncertainty is what this statistics course going to be about.
Since everyone has a lot of uncertainties, probability and statistics,
and are how we quantify and update our beliefs and deal with uncertainty.
But as I said last time, This is a difficult course,
and the best way to learn it is just by doing a lot of problems.
And towards the style of homework, i would like to see:
words, justifications and thinking, not just equations.
Strategic practice: Clarity•Honesty•Words•Practices
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Clarity: What reasoning led you to think that? So i'd like you TO BE AS CLEAR and AS DETAILED AS POSSIBLE in just fully justifying your answer.
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Honesty: I would much rather that you, well of course, try to talk to people and figure it out if you don't understand something, and I would rather say you don't understand that than try to make something up like random gibberish.
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Words: WHAT you SHOULD DO is ACTUALLY HAVE WORDS and SENTENCES, other than the computations a calculator can do.
Just because this is a mathematical class, doesn't mean you shouldn't be using English and explaining things as well as equations. -
Practices: You have to practice as much as you can to improve your pattern recognition skills.
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Experiment: the process of quantifying uncertainty and get certain possible outcomes.
this is a very general concept. we should interpret the word experiment in an extremely broad manner, or we can interpret experiment however we want:
- An experiment can be just anything we are uncertain about it, then do anything as long as there are certain possible outcomes.
- before the experiment, we don't know what's going to happe:
because there are different possible outcomes, and we don't know which one is going to happen. - you do the experiment and then something happens.
above steps about experiment are very very general, it could describe any number of situations.
and we are going to talk experiments a lot in this class,
and we might say it's a random experiment,
but I am not going to use the word random right now,
because we haven't defined it.
i am just interpreting this very very generally.
Probability and Sets:
The ideal of using sets is one of the breakthroughs in probability,
and it actually make us to treat statistics as a mathematical subject.
Sample Space:
A Sample space is the set of all possible outcomes of an experiment.
Event:
An event is a subset of a sample space.

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