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<p>One way to think of statistics is as a set of tools that enable us to learn from data. In any situation, we start with a set of ideas or <em>hypotheses</em> about what might be the case. In the PURE study, the researchers may have started out with the expectation that eating more fat would lead to higher death rates, given the prevailing negative dogma about saturated fats. Later in the course we will introduce the idea of <em>prior knowledge</em>, wh