
Seeing Theory: A visual introduction to probability and statistics (2017) - jicks
https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/index.html
======
no_identd
Glad to see this once more.

Some Hacker News Discussions of this:

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13735714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13735714)

2\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13760353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13760353)

I wish they'd cover the sample space/parameter space distinction "harder", as
it seems key to the numerous philosophical divides in the foundations of
statistics & probability theory, and it seems like a very good candidate for
colorful & animated visualization.

Also, note that the classic coin flipping example used there right in the
beginning serves as an extremely bad & misleading analogy, see here for why:

[https://econ.ucsb.edu/~doug/240a/Coin%20Flip.htm](https://econ.ucsb.edu/~doug/240a/Coin%20Flip.htm)

I wish we'd stop using it in Stats & Physics 101, or at least add huge
disclaimers to it, something like "Coins don't actually behave this way, not
even mathematically idealized ones".

~~~
jointpdf
Coin flipping is a canonical example that has historical, theoretical, and
practical relevance--it's definitely a bit much to call it "extremely bad &
misleading". Mathematically idealized coins _do_ behave in this way, because
you have the freedom to define the probability of the events however you like
(so long as you do not violate the axioms of probability).

Also, there are lots of (abstract) mathematical nuances to explore around coin
flipping once you get into stochastic processes (there are special aspects of
Bernoulli RVs with p=0.5).

Besides, sometimes an imperfect example is a better one--it can stimulate
thought and discussion about how well concepts--like modeling a coin flip with
a random variable--map to the real world.

~~~
nyc111
The chance part of the coin flipping comes from the inability of the human
hand to adjust the speed of flipping exactly the same everytime. Is this
correct? A coin flipped by a robot should land the same side always.

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olooney
I looked up the Victor Powell visualization they cite and it's quite a bit
more in-depth then the version they have:

[http://setosa.io/conditional/](http://setosa.io/conditional/)

But seriously, all of these interactive visualizations are amazing. I wish
they had this kind of stuff when I was an undergrad. I remember trying to plot
the beta distribution for different alpha and beta parameters in MATLAB trying
to get an intuition for it; just dragging the sliders around on the prior and
watching it update as each data point comes in is a million times more
accessible.

~~~
QML
Sometimes a good analogy can take the place of a visualization [1], albeit I
did imagine a distribution getting more concentrated.

[1]
[http://varianceexplained.org/statistics/beta_distribution_an...](http://varianceexplained.org/statistics/beta_distribution_and_baseball/)

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tekkk
Great visualizations. Really liked the practical examples it had for every
topic. Only problem I felt was, that there wasn't an underlying explanation
why one thing followed another. And without understanding the problems you are
solving, you can't really appreciate the hundreds of years worth of
mathematical progress leading to these innovations.

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anonu
Slightly off topic, but beautiful site. I love sites that change and update
the content in a floating manner as you scroll... NYT website has had articles
like this for the past few years..

Does anyone know of packages or libraries that can help you do this? Or do I
just need to hack my own JavaScript?

~~~
spacecaps
"Scrollytelling" is the term you're looking for - The Pudding did a solid
walkthrough of a few libraries [1], and I've found scrollama [2] to be a solid
bare-bones library. This talk [3] is a few years old, but it's a good one for
seeing some different approaches scrollytelling can take.

[1] [https://pudding.cool/process/how-to-implement-
scrollytelling...](https://pudding.cool/process/how-to-implement-
scrollytelling/)

[2]
[https://github.com/russellgoldenberg/scrollama](https://github.com/russellgoldenberg/scrollama)

[3]
[http://vallandingham.me/scroll_talk/examples/](http://vallandingham.me/scroll_talk/examples/)

~~~
anonu
Thanks for this. That's exactly what I was looking for.

Scrollytelling is a terrible name! But at least theres a term for it.

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melling
They are working on a book too:

[https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/index.html#4thPage](https://seeing-
theory.brown.edu/index.html#4thPage)

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nobrains
Reminded me of [https://ncase.me/trust/](https://ncase.me/trust/)

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icodemuch
Love to see people trying to make topics in math and cs more accessible to a
wider audience

