That time Mr. Beast did a paired t-test

1. I assure you, your traditional college-aged students know who Mr. Beast is.

2. If you don't know who he is, just Google him.

3. His real name is Jimmy so that's what I'll call him for the remainder of the post because while I respect his work and can't handle writing/referring to an adult human who isn't a wrestler as Mr. Beast again. Anyway, Jimmy shared, via Twitter (it is still Twitter) that he had done some A/B testing on his clips. A story in two Tweets.

https://twitter.com/MrBeast/status/1699460698726613343

https://x.com/MrBeast/status/1699460698726613343?s=20

This story made the rounds because Mr. Beast is such a famous YouTuber. How can you use this example in class?

1. Introduce A/B testing, and how some of the techniques used by professional statisticians are actually pretty straightforward application of basic statistics tests (here, paired t-test).

2. Conduct a paired t-test: I made up some pretend data that imitates these findings.

3. Review the parts of a paired t-tests. IV: Smile vs. no smile. DV: Seconds spent viewing the video.

4. YouTube content creators may seem to prioritize content, lolz, etc., but a lot of the executive decisions about what videos to post have to do with what people are watching and how they watch the videos. That is all data. Yes, there are already data analytic firms just for influencer data. It is a job.

5. Depending on the kind of psychologist you are and what you teach, you could get into Duchenne smiles versus non-Duchenne smiles, the uncanny valley, etc.

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

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...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

Search This Blog