ABSTRACT
Cognitive psychologists refer to children learning ‘naive physics’, where they learn rules of the physical world through experience. What the people might call ‘naïve statistics’ is much more difficult to acquire. It is also more likely to mislead. Simple observed probability is just the beginning. In discussing inferential statistics, in this chapter, the author needs to keep in mind three distinct types of probability: the observed probability (or proportion), the ‘true’ population probability and the probability that an observation is unreliable. Statements about a sample are sometimes called descriptive statistics (the word statistic here being used in its most general sense, i.e., a number). The basic idea of inferential statistics is to draw an inference from our sample to this population. Inferential statistics is a methodology of extrapolation from data. It rests on a mathematical model that allows us to predict values in the population based on observations in a sample drawn from that population.
