Pareto Principle
80% of results come from 20% of effort. 80% of bugs from 20% of code. Is this a law of nature, or a coincidence with a catchy ratio?
18966 min read
Domain
Statistics
Aggregation, selection, and inference traps hiding in real numbers.
8 entriesFilter these further →
Beginner
Ages 8+, no background needed.
Hawthorne Effect
Workers became more productive every time the researchers changed conditions — even when they changed them back. What was the actual cause?
1924–1932 (studies), 1958 (effect named)6 min read
The Friendship Paradox
Your friends have more friends than you do. So do mine. This is true for almost everybody, all at the same time.
199117 min read
Intermediate
Curious teenagers and general adult readers.
Simpson's Paradox
A treatment does better for men, and better for women, and worse for people. None of the arithmetic is wrong.
1903 (Yule), 1951 (Simpson), 1972 (named)20 min read
Benford's Law
Look at the first digit of every number in a newspaper. You'll see 1 far more often than 9 — and it is a mathematical law, not a coincidence.
19388 min read
The Boy or Girl Paradox
A family has two children and one of them is a boy. What are the odds the other is a girl? It depends on how you found out.
1959 (posed), 1961 (retracted in part)13 min read
Zipf's Law
The most common English word is twice as frequent as the second. Why does language obey the same mathematical law as city populations?
19357 min read
Berkson's Paradox
Two things with nothing whatever to do with each other can look strongly related — purely because of who ended up in the study.
194615 min read