Unsure Calculator

Statistics are scary, but they don't need to be. If you allow me to simplify, the field of statistics is just saying: I'm not certain about these numbers, but I would still like to reason about them. Turns out we're unsure about a lot in our lives, but we can't just throw our arms in the air and say, well, I'm not a statistician.

The idea is simple: apart from regular numbers (like 4, 3.14 or 43942), you can also input ranges (like 4~6, 3.1~3.2 or 40000~45000). The character between the two extremes of the range is a tilde (~), a little wave symbol. You can find it on most keyboards, but for convenience, I also included it in the keypad above.

The range notation says the following to the calculator: I am not sure about the exact number here, but I am 95% sure it's somewhere in this range.

That's it. I thought long and hard about this, and I got to the conclusion that simplicity is key. Yes, we could have notations for different probability distributions, for different confidence levels, for truncations, for covariance, and so on. But that would also make it harder to understand. My assumption is that, if you're already cozy enough with things like confidence levels, you'll want to use something more sophisticated anyway. Here, we're interested in unlocking the power of statistics to a broad audience.

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