ABSTRACT
In this chapter we talked about the second of the five things you need to know about statistics, the dispersion of the distribution as assessed by the standard deviation. The most important point here is that it is this measure of dispersion that enables you to place confidence intervals around your guess (or “estimate”). In our lowly example of just trying to guess a mean, such “confidence” may not seem to have narrowed your range of error very much. But, again, I just want you to get the idea, because this idea will get extended to how we can place confidence in all sorts of estimates.
