3 ms·

Sorry but that mentor has a small practical imagination, a pot can be so large that the top 3 feet that you reach with that spoon could be all oil

• alwa 2y ago
  True! Consistency and representativeness matter, in soup samples as in social samples! Is the soup smooth or lumpy? Striated or uniform? For that matter a soup could (and often does) involve huge soup bones that give it important parts of its flavor, but never show up directly in a spoonful. And you might need something different from a spoon to convincingly rule out some specific rare lumpy ingredient. The didactic value of sampling the soup pot goes well behind its basic function: correcting the beginner’s misperception that a sample’s statistical power is directly related to population size :)
• skeeter2020 2y ago
  to push this analogy too far, that's because you didn't stir it well, not because the spoon is too small.
  • prepend 2y ago
    Have to sample to see if it’s stirred well enough.
    • brookst 2y ago
      No, you can model whether stirring actions should create a representative sample
      • Terretta 2y ago
        Not with immiscible layered stratified flow… “You're gonna need a bigger spoon!”