What are the difference between statistics as numerical facts & statistics as a discipline or field of study?
That depends. A strict numerical fact is: If a company selled 1000 goods in one year, and 1200 the next, it is a numerical increase. However, in the field of study I do not absolutely require the same numerical facts. If I had groups of 100 men and 100 women and tested them, I could conclude these groups are not the same. That is, if their scores differed enough. If this was a good study I might repeat it with 1000 men and 1000 women and eventually conclude the difference is global. But did I check the whole world population? Of course not. So these are not the same, hard, numerical facts. Another difference is interpretation. It is a well known fact children with bigger shoe sizes do better in tests than children with smaller shoe sizes. This is a correlation. So I could conclude it is better to hire people with big feet. Then I would quickly find out that adults with big feet need not at all be smarter than adults with small feet. So, statistics can say a lot of things. If you forget
