I am embarrassed by the mistake I made yesterday in my post “She’s a Hurricane: Evidence That Gender Bias Is Not All Fully Rational Statistical Discrimination” by accepting at face value statistical claims made about how gender of hurricane affects people’s judgment at face value. In both tweets and comments and by private communications, you set me straight–but not before quite a few people “liked” and reblogged my flawed post. 

My embarrassment makes me realize again how useful it is to talk about interesting statistical mistakes. When I was young, I enjoyed the puzzle of trying to figure out the mapping of letters to digits in the addition problem

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MONEY

You are welcome to send me money if you insist, but what I actually want to ask for is instead to send me more statistical mistakes that you find notable. Interesting and instructive mistakes that have actually sent people off in the wrong direction are especially valuable. What are your favorite stories of statistical mistakes?

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