What are statistics?

This might seem like an odd question to ask, but I am frequently surprised by the number of people who cannot answer this simple and yet powerful question: what are statistics? Statistics are the numbers you always see on the news and in the paper. Statistics are useful when trying to prove a point or trying to scare you, but what are they?

To answer this question, we need to back up for a minute and talk about why we even measure them in the first place. The goal of this field is to try to explain and model the world around us. To do that, we have to take a look at the population.

We can define a population as the entire pool of subjects of an experiment or a model.

Essentially, your population is who you care about. Who are you trying to talk about? If you are trying to test if smoking leads to heart disease, your population would be the smokers of the world. If you are trying to study teenage drinking problems, your population would be all teenagers.

Now, consider that...