Project 2. Use and abuse of inference. Few accounts of really complex statistical methods are readable without extensive training. One that is, and that is also an excellent essay on the abuse of statistical inference, is “The Real Error of Cyril Burt,’’ a chapter in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton, 1981). We met Cyril Burt under suspicious circumstances in Exercise 9.27 (page 201). Gould’s long chapter shows that Burt and others engaged in discovering dubious patterns by using complex statistics. Read it, and write a brief explanation of why “factor analysis’’ failed to give a firm picture of the structure of mental ability.