← All categories📊 Statistics & Critical Thinking
The sessions in this category are about a particular kind of mistake: the kind that looks like correct reasoning because it follows from what you can see rather than what you cannot. Survivorship bias, correlation without causation, the counterintuitive math of switching doors on a game show, a rock band that used a bowl of M&Ms to catch contract violations nobody would otherwise notice: these are not obscure academic traps. They show up in news coverage, medical claims, and arguments people make every day at the dinner table.
Nine sessions, including a real 1854 outbreak solved by eliminating explanations one at a time, and a mock trial where two kids argue the exact same facts to opposite conclusions, both honestly. A kid who has lived through the Monty Hall problem has a visceral understanding of why intuition can be systematically wrong. That's different from knowing the answer. The point is not to produce skeptics who distrust everything. It is to produce people who know where the traps are.
- S&CT-1What Counts as Proof?start here~16 minNot all evidence is equally convincing. What actually makes a piece of evidence strong or weak?
- S&CT-2The Invisible Thumb on the Scalestart here~16 minWhy do honest people still end up with skewed results? Bias distorts truth without anyone meaning it to.
- S&CT-3The Brown M&M Inspectors~24 minWhy would a band demand no brown M&Ms backstage? A small, easy-to-check signal that reveals a much bigger problem.
- S&CT-4The Bullet Hole Mystery~23 minWhy did engineers armor the wrong part of the plane? Survivorship bias: sometimes the missing data is the real message.
- S&CT-5Data Detectives~25 minCan a chart lie to you without a single fake number? Reading data skeptically and spotting hidden confounders.
- S&CT-6Eliminating the Impossible~26 minHow do detectives solve a case with no direct proof? Ruling out the impossible until only the truth remains.
- S&CT-7Junior Lawyers on Trial~22 minHow can two people look at the same facts and reach opposite conclusions? Building and testing an argument like a lawyer.
- S&CT-8The Three Cups Game Show~38 minWhy does new information change the odds, even when it feels like it shouldn't? Conditional probability and why intuition fights it.
- S&CT-9The Dice Laboratory~24 minHow do you measure a risk that's real but rare? Using probability and real data to size up danger accurately.
- S&CT-10Order What They're Having~15 minHow do you pick something good somewhere you know nothing? Find someone with a real stake and no reason to mislead you, and follow their lead.
- S&CT-11Junior Consultants on the Case~25 minHow do you estimate something you have no way to actually count? Breaking impossible questions into small, guessable pieces.
- S&CT-12The Reading That Couldn't Agree on You~32 minCan two 'legitimate' ways of reading your personality actually agree with each other? Run the same birthday through two real systems and watch them contradict each other.
- S&CT-13The 99% Test That Fools You~21 minHow can a 90% accurate test still be wrong most of the time? Once the condition is rare enough, most positive results turn out to be false alarms.
- S&CT-14The 2, 4, 6 Trap~23 minWhy does confirming your own guess feel like proof? A classic experiment shows most people never test the one thing that could actually disprove them.
- S&CT-15The Great First Game, the Rough Second One~23 minWhy does a legendary first game get followed by a rough second one? Regression to the mean, and why it makes praise and criticism look more powerful than they are.
- S&CT-16Check Enough Colours and One Looks Guilty~21 minHow does testing 20 things at once turn nothing into a headline? About one will look significant by pure chance, and that's the one that gets reported.
- S&CT-17The Group That Gets Nothing~20 minDoes a convincing result actually prove anything? Not without a control group to compare it against.
- S&CT-18The Mistakes You Only Get to Make Once~23 minHow do you deal with a mistake you can't learn from? For the few risks that could end everything, prevention is the only strategy, and humans have made it work before.
- S&CT-19The Path Nobody Planned~21 minWhat can a street tell you about the people who use it? Every worn patch and mark is evidence, and a good detective writes down what they see, what they think, and what else could explain it.
- GEO-20Seventy Percent Chance of Rain~31 minWhat does "70% chance of rain" mean? How forecasters run today's air forward on a computer, and why they run it fifty times over.