Free · No prior knowledge required

Statistical literacy is self-defence.

Every public debate about medicine, policy, economics, and risk is conducted in statistical language. Most people are defenceless against its misuse. This site changes that — in ten weeks of fifteen-minute daily sessions.

Start the curriculum → Begin Unit 0.1

The Essential Eight

Learn these eight concepts and you are protected against roughly 80% of the statistical manipulation you will encounter in daily life. They are front-loaded throughout the curriculum and marked ★ Essential.

1. Absolute vs relative risk — the most common trick in medicine and advertising

2. Mean vs median — which average was chosen, and why

3. Correlation vs causation — the foundational confusion behind most policy errors

4. Survivorship bias — why visible evidence is systematically misleading

5. Cherry-picking — how time periods, subgroups, and studies are selected to deceive

6. Misleading graphs — the axis trick, the scale trick, the truncation trick

7. Sample representativeness — who is in the study, and who is not

8. Base rate neglect — the most consequential error in everyday probabilistic reasoning

What the curriculum covers

Level 0 · 5 units

Zero-Knowledge On-Ramp

Numbers at scale, percentages, the three averages, reading graphs, and intuitive risk. No prior knowledge required.

Area 1 · 7 units

Foundations

Probability, randomness, the laws of chance, expected value, and a first encounter with Bayes' theorem.

Area 2 · 11 units

Measurement and Its Limits

Distributions, sampling, confidence intervals, p-values, hypothesis testing, and the replication crisis.

Area 3 · 12 units

Applied Detection

Twelve specific tricks used in medicine, politics, finance, and science — with real examples and detection tests for each.

Area 4 · 9 units

The Anti-Curriculum

How human beings fail at statistical reasoning — and the correction for each failure. Ends with Bayes as the synthesis.