Statistics110@Harvard: Clarity•Honesty•Words•Practices: MATH=LOGIC OF CERTAINTY and STATISTICS=LOGIC OF UNCERTAINTIES

Statistics 110 of Harvard University:

Math is the logic of certainty, Statistics is the logic of uncertainty.

quantifying uncertainty is what this statistics course going to be about.

Since everyone has a lot of uncertainties, probability and statistics,

and are how we quantify and update our beliefs and deal with uncertainty.

But as I said last time, This is a difficult course,

and the best way to learn it is just by doing a lot of problems.

And towards the style of homework, i would like to see:

words, justifications and thinking, not just equations.

Strategic practice: Clarity•Honesty•Words•Practices

• Clarity: What reasoning led you to think that? So i'd like you TO BE AS CLEAR and AS DETAILED AS POSSIBLE in just fully justifying your answer.

• Honesty: I would much rather that you, well of course, try to talk to people and figure it out if you don't understand something, and I would rather say you don't understand that than try to make something up like random gibberish.

• Words: WHAT you SHOULD DO is ACTUALLY HAVE WORDS and SENTENCES, other than the computations a calculator can do.
  
  Just because this is a mathematical class, doesn't mean you shouldn't be using English and explaining things as well as equations.

• Practices: You have to practice as much as you can to improve your pattern recognition skills.

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Experiment: the process of quantifying uncertainty and get certain possible outcomes.

this is a very general concept. we should interpret the word experiment in an extremely broad manner, or we can interpret experiment however we want:

• An experiment can be just anything we are uncertain about it, then do anything as long as there are certain possible outcomes.
• before the experiment, we don't know what's going to happe:
  
  because there are different possible outcomes, and we don't know which one is going to happen.
• you do the experiment and then something happens.
  
  above steps about experiment are very very general, it could describe any number of situations.
  
  and we are going to talk experiments a lot in this class,
  
  and we might say it's a random experiment,
  
  but I am not going to use the word random right now,
  
  because we haven't defined it.
  
  i am just interpreting this very very generally.

Probability and Sets:

The ideal of using sets is one of the breakthroughs in probability,

and it actually make us to treat statistics as a mathematical subject.

Sample Space:

A Sample space is the set of all possible outcomes of an experiment.

Event:

An event is a subset of a sample space.