Spreadsheets Tutorial: Defining error and uncertainty

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/error-and-uncertainty-in-spreadsheets at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Hi, everyone. My name is Evan Kramer, and I'm excited to discuss error and uncertainty with you. In this video, we will define basic terminology and key concepts and calculate some basic measures of variation. Let's get started. Imagine you're driving home and someone cuts you off. You honk and yell, cursing the driver and his rude behavior. But what if the person who cut you off is rushing a pregnant friend to the hospital? Would that change your perception? Our brains take shortcuts and make assumptions every day, which can lead to misperception. This course will distinguish errors in judgment from errors in statistics. Errors in judgment include our assumptions about how or why things happened. These reflect our experiences, biases, and psychological tendencies. Errors in statistics refer to measures of variation or uncertainty in the data. This also includes instances in which we draw incorrect conclusions from data. But why do we care about error? How about an example? Imagine you work for a fragrance company marketing colognes. You want to know what kind of advertising will be effective for your new product. You recruit a bunch of your friends, show them a couple of ads, and you find that they like one more than the other. You post that ad on various media and wait for the sales to roll in. But when your new cologne hits the market, no one buys it. Viral posts mock your ad campaign. What happened? Well, a couple of things could be behind this flop. First, you hadn't yet taken this course to determine whether your friends REALLY liked one ad better than the other. Second, perhaps your friends' apparent preference was just random noise in the data. It could be that if we asked a broader group of people (or asked them on a d