Do you know what bugs me? How much time different intro stats textbooks spend talking about probability, lots of A not B stuff*, lots of probability associated with the normal distribution, etc. But we don't take advantage of the discussion to warn their students about the evils of relative vs. absolute risk. #statsliteracy Relative risk is the most clickbaity abuse of statistics that there is. Well, maybe the causal claims based on correlational data are more common. But I think the relative risk is used to straight-up scare people, possibly changing their behaviors and choices. I thought of it most recently when The Daily Mail (bless) used explained the difference in COVID-19 risk between dog owners and non-dog owners .   Here is the data described in the headline, straight from the original paper : Really, Daily Mail? How dare you. I think the most clever, trickiest, sneakiest ways to mislead with data are by not lying with data at all. Most truncated y-axes display actual ...

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr.  Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales.  2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables.  So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes:  1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales.  3) Daily check-in with your students.  1. Teach your students the basics...

 So, as I sit here in December of 2020, I am being inundated with screenshots summarizing other people's Spotify listening data for the last year. Among the descriptive statistics provided by Spotify is recognition, in percentage form, of super fans who listened to A LOT of a given artist's music. Like my Tweep Dr. Sa-kiera Hudson , who loves George Michael. A whole bunch. Since my brain views reality as Stat Teaching Example or Not a Stats Teaching Example, I thought to myself, "Huh, wonder what Kiera's George Michael z-score is? It is a 3.72. And THAT made me think that this could be a funny homework question or in-class example when teaching z-scores.  But then I would need more examples, so I went to the original, very salty prompt for everyone posting their Spotify portions: And here are a bunch more for you to use in class. Throw them at your student for a class warm-up exercise. Use them for extra credit on an exam. Embrace the silly.  Admittedly, some of...