Learning from recent Benford’s Law drama: Reassessing SciComm Tropes
Benford’s Law is this counter-intuitive result from statistics that says in nature, digits 1-9 don’t occur with the same frequency. This law is usually applied to the leading digit of naturally occurring numbers, and states that numbers start with “1” more often than any other digit. This is an established result, and has supposedly been applied to the leading digit of a ton of different data sets including “the surface areas of 335 rivers, the sizes of 3259 US populations, 104 physical constants, 1800 molecular weights, 5000 entries from a mathematical handbook, 308 numbers contained in an issue of Reader’s … Continue reading Learning from recent Benford’s Law drama: Reassessing SciComm Tropes
