Quick Summary / TL;DR

Statistics is a scientific way for turning uncertainty into actionable decisions! In this article I will explain to you, how we do it.

eheeem... that is hopefully before your brain explodes...🤯

Table of Contents

1. What is Statistics? – Our Mega Company 🚀
2. When to Use Statistics 📈
3. Key Ideas to Remember 🧠
4. How Statistics Works in 4 Steps 🔄
5. That's it. That's Statistics. Class dismissed! 🔔☕

1. What is Statistics? – Our Mega Company 🚀

You and I are starting a company today! Let's call it Statistics Billion Euro Bruh Mega Corp. 😎

So...🤧 eheem, what does our company actually do?🤔

Statistics is science's best available system for making educated guesses about the unknown based on what is currently known.

So, bruh, to make our mega-corporation successful, after funding all this crapola ourselves...(yeps, no VC Funding....at all... we all brokies), we need four essential departments. All these are required to make our mega billion euro company work:

1. 📥 Data Collection Department – Collecting...data. You know those pesky survey people that call you about the elections, or when you get some dataset off the "intra-webs"
2. 📊 Descriptive Statistics Department – Bros here do 3 things: 1.treat the data, 2. summarize it and 3. show it.
3. 🔮 Inferential Statistics Department – Here we are going to make inferences from our initial sample to the whole population. Dont worry if your brain just melted. More about this later.
4. 🧮 Mathematical Tools Department – The formulas, probability theory and models that we need to power the focker. Ain't no car movin' without an engine bruh.

2. When to Use Statistics 📈

3. Key Ideas to Remember 🧠

• 🗣️ Statistics is a language — it is the scientific process of making decisions with limited information and try and extrapolate that to the real world.
• 🔄 It's always an iterative process — collect → describe → infer → decide. got it wrong? do it again.

4. How Statistics Works in 4 Steps 🔄

Say in a practical example you decide to sell coffee in the college campus. You email Pablo Escobar's cousin in Colombia and ask bro for 50 packs of coffee. Your class has 50 people, college has 20.000 people. You want to be rich, in general people like coffee, it's a repeat business, but you don't know if 20.000 people are gonna like your coffee or not. Plus you are broke af. So you gotta use your current barely functioning brain cell: You get your espresso machine from home (FREE!), get to class with some Escobar ristrettos and become a barista for $0 bucks a pop before everyone leaving class. You want to know if say a bunch of people like your coffee, if you can extrapolate that to the 20.000 people in campus to become a billionaire.

Department 1: Data Collection 📥

Gathering Data: The Field Agent Work You create a survey with just one question: Do you like the coffee?☕ and binary checkmark answers: yes/no. You take pressure from people to try and please you and with the coffee you just hand them over the paper. You then just collect all 50 of them. Here you also make sure pen has ink and everyone got a clear response or you be fucked cause you lost questionnaires cause some people didn't properly fill them due to either not caring at all or cause pen had no ink.

Department 2: Descriptive Statistics 📊

Describing Data, and Showing it After you get home, still empty handed, and with less coffee, but you now have 50 questionnaires. And you can ask this question: what is the sample proportion of people that liked the coffee. (sample→your class, population→the whole college campus). You found that out of 50 people, 40 said they liked your coffee. so you have a sample proportion of 80%. (40/50 is 80% bruh...)

Department 3: Inferential Statistics 🔮

Making Inferences so you are now interested in knowing how the fuck are you gonna know if the same proportion of people gonna like your coffee too. Cause remember Escobar don't play bruh, and if you order 20.000 packs of coffee and it don't sell, off with 'ya head bruh...just sayin'. So: you want to infer if the same proportion of people in the college campus likes your coffee too.

Department 4: Mathematical Tools 🧮

The Engine Room To do this, technically we need to take further steps to determine the correct sample size to be able to infer to the population size given a certain degree of error, cause there are some stats bros that figured out the actual formula for you to assess this. For now, I just want to give you the general idea. There are formulas for this, and the key point in this Mathematical department is that you don't have to come up with new formulas, Your job as a statistician is to choose the correct formulas for the job at hand.🧠

YOU WITH ME?😜 So: you have a problem and you have to make a decision. You don't have resources to use the entirety of the whole population so you need to work with a sample. So you:

1. Gather data
2. Describe and show it in graphs
3. Make Inferences
4. Learn the Math tools available to do it

That's it. That's Statistics. Class dismissed!🔔☕

Fun Facts! 🎉

• The word "statistics" originally comes from "state" — governments collecting data! 🏛️
• There are more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than atoms in the observable universe! 🃏🌎