Speaker: Jessica Utts, Professor Emerita of Statistics. University of California, Irvine.
Title: Statistical Literacy and Ethics
Abstract: Throughout my career, I have advocated for focusing on statistical literacy, and not formulas, in the first statistics course. Understanding ideas such as statistical versus practical significance, association versus causation, and the prosecutor’s fallacy (confusing conditional probabilities in one direction with those in the other direction) can benefit students in decision-making in daily life. More recently I have been giving talks about ethical concerns in work conducted and reported by statisticians and data scientists. In an “aha moment” I realized that there is substantial overlap between these two topics. In this presentation, I will discuss examples of how misuse of statistical concepts and conclusions, whether intentional or based on naivety, can lead to unethical outcomes. It is more imperative than ever that students who take a statistics course learn statistical literacy.