Introducing the statistical parable

Last week, Andrew Gelman (link) and I were kindred spirits: we both did a "numbersensing" exercise on two different data analyses. I was reading the MailChimp study on the effect of Google siphoning off "marketing" emails into a separate tab, and a noise buzzed my head when I saw that the aggregate click-to-open ratio was reported at an inconceivable 85%. (See Part 1 of my reaction here.) In the meantime, Andrew was investigating a tidbit that appeared in a chapter of the "Doing Data Science" book by Rachel Schutt and Cathy O'Neal, in which it was claimed that the slowness...