Gary King demonstrates The Value of Control Groups in Causal Inference (and Breakfast Cereal):
A few years ago, I taught the following lesson in my daughter’s kindergarden class and my graduate methods class in the same week. It worked pretty well in both. Anyone who has a kid in kindergarten, some good graduate students, or both, might want to try this. It was especially fun for the instructor.To start, I hold up some nails and ask ‘does everyone likes to eat nails?’ The kindergarten kids scream, ‘Nooooooo.’ The graduate students say ‘No,’ trying to look cool. I say I’m going to convince them otherwise.
I hand out a little magnet to everyone. I ask the class to figure out what it sticks to and what it doesn’t stick to. After a few minutes running around the classroom, the kindergardners figure out that magnets stick to stuff with iron in it, and anything without iron in it doesn’t stick. The graduate students sit there looking cool.
From behind the table, I pull out a box of Total Cereal (teaching is just like doing magic tricks, except that you get paid more as a magician). I show them the list of ingredients; ‘iron, 100 percent’ is on the list. I ask by a show of hands whether this is the same iron as in the nails. 3 of 23 kindergarten kids say ‘yes’; 5 of 44 Harvard graduate students say ‘yes’ (almost the same percent in both classes!).
Read the whole thing.
(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)