Feedback

Post originally by Paul Mitchener at 2005-01-26 05:46:10
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Hmm...second month in a row with no feedback. I wonder if people are trying to tell me something.

Post originally by Stupendous Press at 2005-09-21 09:21:45
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Hey, Paul. I love the column, but I'm still confused about exactly what the value of a standard deviation means. For instance, the d20 example has a mean outcome of 10.5 and standard deviation of 5.8. What does 5.8 mean?

Post originally by Paul Mitchener at 2005-09-29 03:18:30
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The standard deviation is best thought of as the average distance a random variable is from the mean outcome. People have written a fair bit more about this elsewhere in the feedback- the problem was that I only explained what the mathematical definition of a standard deviation is, without saying much about the intuition behind it.