This was illuminating. I love the concept of a formula as a story. That’s a PERFECT way of describing it for someone who is not intuitively math minded. From now on I can say “I don’t understand the story this formula is telling.” I’ll bet you were a great math tutor.
Great explainer! Agreed with Erin: The description of a formula as a story is illuminating. It was certainly not how I was taught to think about it - I'd just be plugging the numbers into the calculator.
As someone who views formulas as alien runes, and whose husband uses terms from this article all the time (and I nod as though I knew what he was talking about), I thank you for this clear and helpful explanation!
I assume representativeness of the sample pool only matters if we expect purple people and green people to differ on whatever it is we’re testing. If we go across campus to the west side and take a few surveys and the results look pretty much like what we were getting on the east side, at what point will we decide we can leave without getting an equivalent sample of green people?
This was illuminating. I love the concept of a formula as a story. That’s a PERFECT way of describing it for someone who is not intuitively math minded. From now on I can say “I don’t understand the story this formula is telling.” I’ll bet you were a great math tutor.
It was a really fun job.
Great explainer! Agreed with Erin: The description of a formula as a story is illuminating. It was certainly not how I was taught to think about it - I'd just be plugging the numbers into the calculator.
As someone who views formulas as alien runes, and whose husband uses terms from this article all the time (and I nod as though I knew what he was talking about), I thank you for this clear and helpful explanation!
Really enjoyed this post! I'm a very new subscriber but I'm loving your blog so far :)
Thank you. I always appreciate feedback. Let me know what other topics you might be interested in reading about
I assume representativeness of the sample pool only matters if we expect purple people and green people to differ on whatever it is we’re testing. If we go across campus to the west side and take a few surveys and the results look pretty much like what we were getting on the east side, at what point will we decide we can leave without getting an equivalent sample of green people?
(Also, happy Thanksgiving!)
The thought experiment was that we know purple people tend to prefer ube and green tend to prefer key lime. I'll add that in to clarify
What do you have against "to be"? Is that a stylistic choice or a precision choice?