As it relates to China, I think they care very much...but China cares because it wants to see the world's reaction to help gauge their own plans for Taiwan. I think Russia's feelings toward Ukraine very much mirror China's feelings towards Taiwan. China would very much like to take over Taiwan, and if Russia "gets away" with taking over Ukraine, it's a good bet that China v Taiwan will be next.

But otherwise, yes, I agree that "China primarily cares about preserving its trade relationships with Russia and the West."

Sorry if this post wasn't meant to be newbie-friendly...what is EA?

Yep. I think the best lessons I've learned revolve around actually *trying* to second guess myself. I'd crunch some numbers, feeling confident that I did everything right, only to realize that my assumptions or logic or something *other* than the mechanics of number crunching was off or wrong.

I would say that logic is actually more important than math

can you elaborate? :)

I kind'a sort'a thought learning data analysis would give me "magical powers" to glean insight from data....like I could just throw a bunch of data on a spreadsheet, run some formulas and functions, and voila...enlightenment. But there's a LOT that goes into deciding things like what kind of data to use, what to exclude, *how* to process the data, how to *interpret* the data *and* the results, etc. The formulas and statistics is just a small part of the toolbox used in data analysis.

There's a lot of planning, pre-planning, figuring out what you want to find out and how to get there from what you have...you have to use a lot of logic, critical thinking skills, things like that before you even start doing the math and statistics, and certainly *after* you do the math. Does that make sense?

I would say that logic is actually more important than math, though my knowledge of "data analysis" is very limited. Again, basic statistical knowledge and math is useful...things like what is/how to calculate standard deviations, correlation, regression, etc.

I've taken this class, and while it's specific to Google Sheets, looking at the syllabus might give you some clues about what to study: https://courses.benlcollins.com/p/data-analysis-with-google-sheets

Also, non-math-related concepts like how to clean and organize data is very important, though I never even though about it until I started learning about data analysis. After all, garbage in, garbage out.