what is the null hypothesis and can you give me some simple examples?
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The null hypothesis is simply “there’s nothing special about what I’m looking at”.
Imagine you have a coin. You can ask two very similar questions: “is this coin biased?” Or “is this coin balanced?”
When you ask “is this coin biased?” You’re effectively saying “I expect coins in general to be balanced, but think this particular one might not be”. When you ask “is this coin balanced?” You’re sort of saying the opposite: “I expect this sort of coin to have a 51:49 split between heads and tails, but this one might be perfectly balanced”.
In the first case, your null hypothesis is that the coin is balanced and has perfect 50:50 odds. In the second case, your null hypothesis is that the coin has a slight 51:49 bias.
The reason this matters is that the null hypothesis is what you go back to if the experiment is inconclusive. If you throw the coin twenty times and you get an 11:9 split, that’s nowhere near enough to justify changing your mind no matter what you believed in to begin with.
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