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Username: kristopher
Date/Time: Sun, November 12, 2000 at 8:47 AM GMT
Browser: Netscape Communicator V4.76 using Windows 98
Score: 5
Subject: Statistics

Message:
 

 
>Do you know statistics?
A sample of 1% can show the general trends and shares of the whole 100%. Inside this 1% sample, if 90% is favorable to IOD and 10% is against IOD, you can be sure that in the whole 100% there will be similar shares - similar means 85% or 94% or something near 90%.<

This is again quite funny, since I took a few statistics classes in college and although I'm not a mathematical genius, what you say above is absolute hogwash. A sample of 1% CAN show general trends, but this is highly unlikely and is not a statistical rule. You cannot take 500 people from an Internet forum and say that the statistical trends seen amongst those 500 people represent the statistical trends of millions of users. This is further complicated by the fact that nearly everybody here has some knowledge of the situtation, whereas only a miniscule percentage OF a percentage of the Internet population even knows what's going on here.

A good example:

I could go to Los Angeles, California and survey 1000 people on whether they prefer the East Coast of the USA or the West Coast of the USA. If 90% of the people say they prefer the West Coast and 10% prefer the East Coast, can I assume that this is the same across the entire United States? Absolutely not! Not only is the sample size too small, it is an unrepresentative sample group! That's exactly what we have here.

I can see that you obviously haven't taken any statistics classes, or if you did, you didn't pay very good attention.

Regards,

Kristopher Ross
from USA

(like that tells you anything useful)
     

 

Link: The Cartoon Guide to Statistics


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