You’ve loaded up all the data. You’ve run the algorithms. You’ve completed your analysis. But how do you know that you are right? It’s incredibly easy to fool yourself, but fortunately, there is a long history of fields grappling with the problem of determining truth in the face of uncertainty, from statistics to intelligence analysis.
Required
- Correlation and causation, Business Insider
- The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, chapters 1,2,3 and 8. Richards J. Heuer
Recommended
- If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?, Michael Nielsen
- Graphical Inference for Infovis, Hadley Wickham et al.
- Why most published research findings are false, John P. A. Ioannidis
Discussed in class:
- Drawing conclusions from data, another version of this lecture, plus post and links for learning stats
- Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology, a classic on the difficulties of statistical significance and quantization in psychology