Real synthetic scholarship

I (Michael Best) recently presented to a lower-division undergraduate class statistics supporting the hypothesis that Internet access can enhance a population’s political and civil liberties. Most of the students had never taken a statistics course, and one of them—enjoying the innocent curiosity of youth often dispatched by four years of university education—asked how I knew that a statistically strong relationship between two variables had not occurred by chance. I fumbled an explanation by noting how we might and a relationship between two independent sequences of a coin toss, that any such relationship would be just a matter of chance, and that we could apply basic probability to determine the likelihood of just such an event. Then I told the truth: I was able to cite a probability, because these days, we all have access to exceptionally sophisticated statistical software, and I relied on the software to calculate it for me.