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Comment on Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?parent

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Someone who has no idea what a standard deviation is can't intuit about distributions.

I disagree vehemently with this claim. I could cite my experience in teaching this topic to liberal arts / humanities college students in the US, but it is really more obvious than that. Anyone can understand a histogram easily and far more intuitively than they can understand the formula for a standard deviation and whether it must divide by N or N-1. Statistics courses and textbooks get stuck on that kind of pedantry, and most students end up missing the forest for the trees.

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