Statistics > Calculus

… For most people anyway. Because I missed my video post yesterday, here’s a very short TED talk from Arthur Benjamin on why we should teach statistics before calculus.

Of course, calculus has it’s place and is extremely important, but statistics, probability, and data analysis are so much more useful in everyday life. It would be a tremendous leap forward in promoting scientific literacy in the US. After all, if more people knew what a p-value was or what a confidence interval actually is, society as a whole would be a lot better equipped to understand the numbers that are constantly thrown at us. Reporters might realize that if one study finds a statistically significant result which is unable to be replicated, most likely they made a type I error and the null was probably rejected by random chance error.

I hope that in my lifetime, all students will…