Statistical Biases

Misunderstanding numbers, probabilities, and statistics

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Neglect of Probability

Neglect of probability is the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.

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Ludic Fallacy

The ludic fallacy is the misuse of games to model real-life situations.

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Sampling Bias

Sampling bias is a bias in which a sample is collected in such a way that some members of the intended population have a lower or higher sampling probability than others.

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Selection Bias

Selection bias is the bias introduced by the selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved.

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Survivorship Bias

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility.

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Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy which is committed when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are overemphasized. From this reasoning, a false conclusion is inferred.

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Pareidolia

Pareidolia is a specific form of apophenia involving the perception of images or sounds in random stimuli, such as seeing faces in clouds.

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Apophenia

Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.

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Clustering Illusion

The clustering illusion is the tendency to erroneously consider the inevitable 'streaks' or 'clusters' arising in small samples from random distributions to be non-random.

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