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The Drunkard 's Walk I Had Confirmation Bias

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Before I read The Drunkard 's Walk I had confirmation bias (haha) towards it. I had seen last years statistics students carrying the book around. It looked really interesting to me and after reading the summary on the back, I had wanted to check it out. When Mr. Letzring told everyone we would read it, some people were disappointed. I by no means enjoy reading, but I was excited to see what the Drunkard 's Walk had to bring. I thought it would contain more equations and less conceptual ideas and examples. My mom, just like me, thought it looked interesting just by seeing the cover and back. She bought her own Drunkard 's Walk that day. The Drunkard 's Walk is about the randomness in everyday life that we may otherwise overlook without …show more content…

This explanation really helped me to understand the Normal Distribution model. The Law of Large Numbers is a great way to understand how statistics works. The law explains that as a sample size increases, the sample result will approach the true value (parameter). Another way of saying this is, the more data that is collected, the more precise the final result will be to what it 's supposed to be. For example, if a coin is tossed 200 times, and 15% of the tosses are heads, the law of large numbers states that the more tosses that are performed, that 15% will eventually creep up to 50%. The book helped me to understand that every event has a true probability, but random variation will stand out in smaller samples. The random variation of the small samples will not affect the probability when more events have occurred.
Confirmation bias is a huge detriment to receiving accurate data in which the data is influenced by human error. Confirmation bias is seeking evidence to confirm our preconceived notions, and interpreting ambiguous evidence in favor of our ideas. Another way of saying this is having an expectation or opinion going into an event, and using as much clues as we can to back up that opinion. This is very inaccurate because you may have tunnel vision when analyzing an event, instead of looking at it as a whole. A great example of confirmation bias is when a teacher initially believes a

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