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Besides the sociological problems listed, we must always be conscious of how counterintuitive and difficult statistical inference itself can be. Good things to search for are statistical fallacies, probabilistic paradoxes and books like Counterexamples in Probability.

And it is not sufficient to read about them once or twice; researchers who use statistical inference regularly must revisit these caveats at least as regularly.

Myself, I have taught Probability and Statistics many times, discussed and dispelled many misconceptions by students. Would I be 100% sure I will not be caught up in a fallacy while informally thinking about probability? I wouldn't even be 10% sure; any intuition I conjure up, I would triple check as rigorously as possible.



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