Analysis of Alan Smith's TED talk on "Why you should love statistics" ?

3. Think you’re good at guessing stats?
Guess again.
Whether we consider ourselves math people or
not, our ability to understand and work with
numbers is terribly limited, says data
visualization expert Alan Smith. In this delightful
talk, Smith explores the mismatch between what
we know and what we think we know.

4. List the two most
(important/interesting/
informative)
insights from this talk?

5. Statistics is about us. It's a common notion, a
misconception, that it only caters to the smart, to
the mathematicians.
It's a branch of science that deals with data about
the community or state that we live in and thus,
has major real-life value and applications in
various fields.

7. There's a disjoint between people's perception
and the reality. People are quite poor intuitive
statisticians.

8. Perception vs. Reality

9. Reasons for this disjoint include –
1. Individual experiences that influence our views
2. Media reports about the exceptional rather than
the normal.
The problem is both global and local.

10. Why and How are these
insights relevant to a
manager in India?

11. These insights are very significant because most
decisions in markets are based on data. This data
is mostly obtained from consumers through
surveys. It is important to statistically analyze this
data practically.

13. This also gives them an idea about the
importance of data and statistics as tools for
analyzing and researching the consumer
community which would be especially diverse and
differently particular in their choices.

15. What Kahneman said is true. Unless we accept
the fact that numeracy can beat the best of us,
there can be enormous repercussions in
important decision-making, especially for
managers in India.

17. Once managers accept that, they can come up
with ways to identify errors in data analysis and
survey conduction and come up with ways to
minimize these errors so that the best results can
be achieved.