Statistically Significant Haikus
Day 23 prompt: Quantitatively modeling our way through the world’s variations…
Nature versus Nurture
Sir Francis Galton.
Polymath, eugenicist.
Birthed the Holocaust.
Darwin’s half-cousin.
Where did his genius derive?
Statistics answers.
Quantitatively
Modeling our way through the
World’s variations.
Correlations and
Regressions toward the mean
Are his gifts to us.
The wisdom of crowds…
Today we often see a jar of jellybeans and enter a drawing to win a prize if we guess the number in the jar. We often speak of the wisdom of the crowds, the supposed magical ability of a crowd to somehow zero in shockingly close to the correct answer. The wisdom of the crowd is actually a calculation of the average of everyone’s guesses. If enough people submitted honest guesses, the average of all the answers is often very close to the real deal.
The person who first came up with this idea is Sir Francis Galton. These contests are older than we…
