> How much do you understand about statistics and p-values?

I suspect that it’s far far less than 38% of people who actually understand statistics to this level. I suspect if someone on HN went around and asked their co workers to explain what a P value is in 2 sentences, it would be less than 10% of a (presumably) highly educated workforce.

I suspect about 40% of adults are unable to tell the difference between mean/median/ mode, or could answer the Monty hall problem, or even “if I flip a coin 3 times are the chances I get heads 3 times in a row”

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jampekka a day ago | parent | next [-]

10% may be a magnitude too high at least if we expect the explanation to be correct. For example in a sample of statisticians/epidemiologists only 12.5% got two basic features of p-values correct [1]. And there are a lot of studies showing similar levels of misunderstanding among people using p-values professionally.

I use p-values daily. I can and do compute them using various methods, including by hand. But I'd still not be confident in my two sentence explanation. P-values are very unintuitive and very easy to get subtly wrong.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35991465/

	▲	maccard 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		P values are tricky, and I think you can get a lot out of knowing what they are without being able to compute them and use them reliably. But statisticians not knowing the basics of the Null Hypothesis is absolutely terrifying!

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ViscountPenguin a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In my experience, a not insignificant chunk of students actively in a stats class think that a p value is the probability of the null hypothesis. My money is on more like 3% of educated professionals.

	▲	maccard a day ago \| parent [-]
		If you asked me for the definition of p value I could give it to you but if you asked me what it meant before this thread I would have said the same thing as you’ve said here.

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izacus a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most HNers don't even understand what percentages are and throw out dumb statements like "mega corp can treat 1% of users like crap, it's a small number!"

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applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, the Monty Hall problem is a literal gotcha that trips up literal professors, that's a horrendous example to use as the baseline for "basic understanding of statistics".

Other than that choice of example, I do agree in that I doubt anywhere near 40% of adults have basic statistical literacy. I've played in card game tournaments semi-professionally and just gambler's fallacy + results-oriented thinking alone make it so easy to take other people's money, and if you can't figure out such basic concepts as "getting tails once doesn't mean I'm due for a heads next flip" even when you're literally losing money, what are the chances of anyone else caring about understanding it when they're not even being given the hands-on reward-based reinforcement learning opportunity?

	▲	maccard a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I maybe should have ignored the Monty hall problem - although I’d guess if you’ve studied enough stats to know what a P value is, and how to measure it, you’ve come up against the Monty hall problem!