Probably Overthinking It#
This site contains the Jupyter notebooks I used in my preparation of Probably Overthinking It: How to Use Data to Answer Questions, Avoid Statistical Traps, and Make Better Decisions.
If you’ve read the book and you want to know how the analysis works, this is the place. And if you read these notebooks, and you want to get the book, you can order from Bookshop.org and Amazon (affiliate links).
Before you read these notebooks, please keep in mind:
There is some explanatory text in the notebooks, but some of the examples will not make sense until you have read the corresponding chapter in the book.
While preparing these notebooks, I made some changes to improve the readability of the code. There might be small differences between what appears in the book and what you get when you run the code.
Chapters#
Chapter 1: Are You Normal? Hint: No.
Run the code that prepares the BRFSS data
Run the code that prepares the Big Five data
Chapter 2: Relay Races and Revolving Doors
Chapter 3: Defy Tradition, Save the World
Chapter 4: Extremes, Outliers, and GOATs
Run the code that prepares the BRFSS data
Run the code that prepares the NSFG data
Chapter 5: Bettter Than New
Chapter 6: Jumping to Conclusions
Chapter 7: Causation, Collision, and Confusion
Run the code that prepares the NCHS data
Chapter 8: The Long Tail of Disaster
Run the code that prepares the earthquake data
Run the code that prepares the solar flare data
Chapter 9: Fairness and Fallacy
Chapter 10: Penguins, Pessimists, and Paradoxes
Run the code that prepares the GSS data
Chapter 11: Changing Hearts and Minds
Chapter 12: Chasing the Overton Window
Examples#
These notebooks are not tied to a single chapter; they explore topics from the book and related questions.
The Principal Components of Anthropometry
Chile Earthquake Magnitudes
Greatest GOAT of All Time?
Is the Ideology Gap Growing?
Are you middle-aged?
Power law? Or just a guideline?
The Girl Named Florida
Field Sobriety Tests and the Base Rate Fallacy