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As a practicing statistician, I have to whine about this. The issue is selection bias; the four observed events are not independent random samples from the sam
by waldrews 18y ago
As a practicing statistician, I have to whine about this.
The issue is selection bias; the four observed events are not independent random samples from the same Bernoulli distribution, but the events about which we have learned because they were interesting enough to write about. Unless we are willing to model the process by which people choose to write about their experiences, which is quite infeasible in this case, we can make no inferences.
- mattmaroon 18y agoWell, the whole thing began here. I made a joke about the title of a post "Macbook Brick" which admittedly is much likelier for someone who has observed a lot of failures to do, and then we devolved into a discussion about sample sizes. I was more intending to point out that small sample sizes can prove things with a high degree of certainty sometimes. It's true though that how they are collected matters much.
- sec314 18y agoWhat about the maximum entropy interpretation? Even if we're unwilling to model the selection process, most models for any population sufficiently large will choose outcomes indistinguishable from random.