What is a p-value?
Audience: high-school
Tags: probabilitystatisticshypothesis-testingp-value
My first math/manim video! A friendly introduction to hypothesis testing, with minimal math background required. Most p-value explanations that I've come across focus only on the mechanical process of calculation, without telling students why they're doing it or how to interpret the results. So this video is me attempting to motivate the concept of hypothesis testing from first principles. I had to cut things like error rates, test statistics, two-sided tests, and multiple testing correction for the next video, but Part 1 here should stand on its own. Thank you to all peer-reviewers for your time and feedback!
Analytics
Comments
It’s a good video about statistics. It also gives heavy Matt Parker Dream Cheating Scandal vibes.
This explanation is well done and animated, but it is a pretty common topic. I would be interested to see the expansions and intuitive explanations from the follow-up video.
The Minecraft speedrunner Couriway is currently doing 100.000 Minecraft speedruns. Yes, it’ll take him decades. And yes, he’s effectively streaming every day to achieve this. Of course, he’s documenting everything; also the drop rates of blazes, for example. The interesting thing is, when you do such a simple but randomized speedrun for almost 10.000 times (he’s at run 7.000 at the time of me writing this comment), you can start to see and confirm patterns where you couldn’t before. E.g. the chance of cheating, or confirming the actual probability of some item dropping. (Couriway’s rates definitely prove that he’s not cheating.)
Minecraft is already being used in some schools to teach kids in various ways, at least to my knowledge. Using Minecraft as an example naturally hooks kids (and adults) into listening and caring about math. Applied math like this is always my favorite kind of math.
Your video is clear; it’s not a novel subject but its applied to a topic that many people care about (i.e. Minecraft); and because your video editing and story telling is quite good the video is memorable.
I know it’s a bit strict, but I’ve removed 0.3 score points because in the guidelines it says that “each entry should be self-contained, not part of a series, playlist, or larger project”. Splitting this video up into two parts otherwise would be totally fine. I say that fully understanding how difficult it is to make a 40+ minute video. Other than that, it’s a great video that I would recommend to anyone who’s e.g. new to the speedrunning scene of a randomized game like Minecraft.
I really love how you conceptualized hypotheses as worlds. Also, you anticipated the question I had in mind on spot, about how we’d calculate the probabilities for the alternative world. This is a topic that is ubiquitous, but I struggled to find a good intuition for it. So thank you for making it so clear with this video, one I wish I had when I was a student. :)
Nice presentation, good use of graphics. The Minecraft theme could attract many students. Interesting.
Excellently done all around! The example was well-chosen and well-motivated, and followed through on throughout the video. If there’s anything I would suggest changing it would probably be cutting the section with the dice-rolling example from about 9:00 to about 11:45; I don’t think it’s necessary to motivate what’s essentially the same calculation afterwards in the coin-flip case (from 11:45 to about 13:00) and the latter is directly relevant to the example at hand. This is really picking nits, though; the animations are well-done (the transitions between various numbers of events in the binomial distribution around 12:30 especially stood out for me; it’s hard to believe this is your first Manim video!) and your logic and explanations are clear throughout the video.