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08/07/2012

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Don Robertson

While the artilce is commendable from the standpoint of discussing statistical concepts, I was concerned that the author equated the probability of being one standard deviation away from the mean with throwing snake eyes (two 1's with a pair of dice). The probability of snake eyes is 1/6 * 1/6 = 1/36. Doing that three times in a row is (1/36)*(1/36)*(1/36) or .00002 which is far more extreme than an observation being one standard deviation away from the mean. We should be careful about interpreting statictical results in a way that needlessly overstates the case.

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