Big Talk About Small Samples 246
The smallest sample I've ever used to make an argument was when I submitted some legal briefs, each no longer than five pages, in the anti-spam cases that I'd been filing in Washington State small claims court. Since I suspected the judges were not taking the cases seriously, I filed the briefs with the third and fourth pages stuck together in the center, by a tiny thread of paper joining the back of the third page to the front of the fourth page. (If someone were to turn the pages and actually readthe brief, the thread would break.) I did something similar in six different cases, and when the motions were all rejected, I went to the courthouse to look at the paper motions still in the file. In three out of six cases, the judge had rejected the motion without reading it first.
Now, the point was not to make any accurate estimation of the actual proportion, in the total population of small claims court judges, who would reject a brief in an anti-spam case without reading it. There's no basis for saying that the proportion of such judges is close to 50%. But we can still probably reject any contention that the proportion of such judges is very low. If only 10% of judges were rejecting motions without reading them, then there is only about a 1.4% chance of taking a random sample of six rejected motions and finding that in three or more cases, the judge did not read the motion. Even if 20% of judges were doing so, for an event with a probability of p=0.20 you would still only see it occur in three out of six cases, about 8.2% of the time. (If an event has probability p, the exact probability of that event occuring three or more times in six trials is given by 20*(p^3)*((1-p)^3) + 15*(p^4)*((1-p)^2) + 6*(p^5)*((1-p)^1) + 1*(p^6)*((1-p)^0).) So we can say that the proportion of such judges is quite probably more than 20%. I did this repeatedly because even after I had "caught" the first judge, I wanted to head off any objection that this was just an isolated case of rare behavior.
And, as always, it's important not to generalize too much about the behavior whose probability we're estimating. I don't think that 20% or more of judges, even in small claims court, are throwing most types of cases without reading or listening to the arguments. My impression was that most judges see view small claims court as a place to redress injustices, and that they see anti-spam and anti-telemarketer plaintiffs as just trying to "make money" at it, so they take those suits less seriously. I disagreed with this stance because (1) anti-spam plaintiffs usually really have been harmed and are not just "whining about one email" which they are trying to "cash in" (I still get so much spam that it interferes somewhat with the operation of my server and with my ability to get through my daily email); and (2) the law is intended after all as a deterrent, with disproportionate damages in order to discourage spammers from spamming in the first place. However, the charitable reading of the results is to assume that judges are merely biased against anti-spam plaintiffs -- but at least they probably don't treat all cases as casually as they treat anti-spam suits!
Back to the issue of small samples. My previous article was prompted by an editorial about the online response that had been elicited by two different photos -- one showing a black woman breastfeeding, and a nearly identical photo showing a white woman breastfeeding. The author asserted that the photos had received vastly different responses, which she attributed to racism. I presented a survey to a sample if users recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, randomly showed each survey-taker one of the two photos, and asked:
Our academic department has asked everyone to submit a "fun" photo of themselves, so that our photos can be displayed together on the department home page. One of our employees submitted a photo that has caused some internal debate about whether the photo is inappropriate. I wanted to do a poll to get the opinion of a random sample of Internet users of different backgrounds.
Do you think this is an appropriate picture to be used in a photo collection on our academic department home page?
Out of 47 respondents who saw the black woman's photo, 36 of them (77%) said it was inappropriate. Out of 54 respondents who saw the white woman's photo, 38 of them (70%) said it was inappropriate.
As before, these samples are to small to say precisely what the relevant proportions in the background populations are, but we can probably reject certain statements about the populations -- for example, that the percentage of users offended by the black woman's photo is 20 percentage points higher than the percentage of users offended by the white woman's photo. This is where the counterintuitive part comes in. Suppose that in the background population, 81% of respondents would find the black woman's photo offensive, but only 61% would be offended by the white woman's photo. What are the odds of getting 77% or less "yes that's offensive" responses from a sample of 47 users shown the black woman's photo, and getting 70% or more "yes that's offensive" responses from a sample of 54 users shown the white woman's photo? It doesn't sound unlikely at all, because the percentages are quite close to the originals -- but you can verify, either with statistical calculations or with a quickly written computer program, that the odds are only about 2.5%.
Two main factors contribute to this counterintuitive result. First, even with a sample size of a few dozen, the frequency of an event starts to tend very closely to the frequency in the background population (if 80% of your population has some trait, and you take a sample of size 50, there's about a 95% chance that the number with that trait in your population will be between 34 and 46). Second, to find the odds of seeing both of these deviations at the same time (deviating from an assumed 81% in the background population down to 77% in the first sample, and deviating from an assumed 61% in the background population up to 70% in the second sample), you have to mutiply the probabilities of these two unlikely events. The probability of the first deviation is about 19%, the probability of the second is about 13%, and so the probability of them both occurring is about 2.5%.
The reason I calculated the odds of getting 77% or less "offended" responses for the black woman's photo while also getting 70% or more "offended" responses for the white woman's photo, is that in calculating the "unlikeliness" of a statistical result, it's customary to calculate the odds of getting "this result or a more extreme one". For example, suppose you want to know if a company's hiring process is gender-balanced (assuming a 50/50 gender split in the population), and you notice that in a random sample of 100 recent hires, 61 were men. You wouldn't ask "What are the odds of there being exactly 61 men in this sample?", because the odds of getting any particular number, are small. You'd ask, "What are the odds of getting this result or a more extreme one -- i.e. the odds of getting 61 or more men out of a random sample of 100, if the population were truly gender-balanced? As this calculation tool shows, the odds are only about 1.7%.
Similarly, in the case of the two populations being measured, the author of the original editorial hypothesized that there was some significant gap between the percentages of the population that were offended by the two photos, which I arbitrarily assumed to be 20 percentage points. Under that assumption, showing the two pictures to two different groups and having them be offended at similar rates, is the unexpected, "extreme" result, and the closer the rates are to each other, the more extreme the result is. That's why I calculated "77% of less" for the first group vs. "70% or more" for the second group.
And out of the pairs of numbers that I tested which were separated by 20 percentage points, 81% and 61% were the numbers which made the given result the least unlikely. 80/60 and 79/59 give odds of about 2.5% and 2.4%; 82/62 and 83/63 give odds of 2.4% and 2.2%.
You can do the statistical calculations directly, but in case you won't believe it unless you see the results unfold with your own eyes, you can run this perl script, which iterates through a million trials of the experiment, counting the number of times that the unexpected result occurs.
Why did I assume a 20-point gap? That was the most subjective leap that I made. Looking through the original editorial, I figured that on the basis of inflammatory statements like
"Only one woman was called 'adorable' by the media and portrayed with girlish innocence, and it wasn't the black one. It never is."
and
"The contrast in headlines is so stark, it deserves to be examined" [I assume here she meant the contrast in responses]
the author meant to imply a difference in people's attitudes that was at least that large. But the results suggest that it isn't.
For all of this effort, of course, I could have just expanded the original experiment to a sample of several hundred and mollified some people's concerns. But I wanted to argue for what you can show, even with small samples, because I would like to try (and would like others to try) similar experiments in the future, and do not think people should be discouraged if they can't afford to pay a thousand Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to take their survey. I paid my 100 respondents $0.25 each; naturally, one experiment I'd like to do soon is to figure out what's the lowest I can get away with paying them.
I am not reading that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is trying to move their user base from news for nerds and geeks to news for normals.
Seriously, I've noticed the Register getting more active as people move over there.
We, geeks, view this entire article as a bunch of shenanigans that waste our time. Please stop spitting in my face.
Give me an article about Intel latest and greatest chipset plans or how AMD screwed the poorch or about how one can modify a blackberry to run android applications. Those things are Useful.
\
Infotainment designed to incite does not nor should enter my world, it makes my world more stressful and wastes my time.
Re:I am not reading that. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad you think explaining, mathematically, a statistical forecasting process is for "normals".
Whereas us "geeks" are only interested in short little blurbs about software pathces, right?
Now, I absolutely understand everyone who is concerned about a single contributor dominating the submission queue, possibly hurting the richness of available information, but your complaint seems so petty. Actual critical reasoning about previous information that was questioned is the good kind.
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What we should really do is shut down the psychology and sociology departm
Re:I am not reading that. (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, this is basic statistics.
Some Slashdot commenters have shown that they need an article about basic statistics, more specifically what can be inferred even from a small sample. Read the first paragraph.
Re:I am not reading that. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lots of people out there (and here) who do not understand basic statistics. Bennett Haselton is one of them.
The FIRST problem is not the small sample set. It is that the small sample set is "some people on Amazon's Mechanical Turk who are willing to take a survey for $X". His sample set is flawed.
And his home-written "survey" is also flawed.
So his math is meaningless. Garbage-in, Garbage-out.
In order to deal with the flaw in his sample set he'd have to have a much larger sample set. OR a properly selected sample set.
THEN he'd need his "survey" re-written.
And only then could he try his hand at the math. He hasn't even explained what his margin of error is or which method he used to calculate it. BECAUSE HE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND STATISTICS.
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normally i'd frown on the all caps... but in this case i believe it is both with merit, and very appropriate.
Kudos
Re:I am not reading that. (Score:5, Informative)
Haselton needs an article about basic statistics. The 95% confidence interval on the difference between the two proportions is 6% +/- 17%, i.e. the range from about -11% to +23%. This (a) demonstrates that the sample is indeed underpowered to distinguish the sort of effect sizes that Haselton appears to be interested in, and (b) demonstrates that a +20% difference in proportion, contrary to Haselton's assertion, absolutely falls within the range of true values that can't be ruled out at a standard level of statistical confidence given the outcome of this experiment.
see http://www.kean.edu/~fosborne/bstat/06d2pop.html for the basic statistics.
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Slashdot is trying to move their user base from news for nerds and geeks to news for normals.
No normal person is going to be the least bit interested in Bennett Haselton's inane ramblings.
I have no idea why Slashdot is posting this garbage, but attracting "normal" readers certainly is not why.
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Infotainment designed to incite does not nor should enter my world, it makes my world more stressful and wastes my time.
Proof that the terrorist have won.
(asking why that is proof, is proof that the terrorist have won.)
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That's pretty much how I saw reading this material. Guess what, statistically people are still racist and even more people seem to be offended by feeding of babies in public.
There was not enough data to assist in this statistically small sampling.
Why I get so frustrated by polls anymore is that there are so many variables that can affect the outcome. Nathan Silver has done a great job of minimizing the noise and amplifying the signal, but the work involved is impressive. I have seen poor phrasing of ques
According to an equally valid poll (Score:5, Funny)
In a recent poll conducted randomly via the Internet among people who are girl gamers, we found that 99 percent think breastfeeding images are none of your business.
Equally sound on a statistical basis, and just as randomized, with a t value of 42.
Keep reading to see what Bennett has to say. (Score:5, Insightful)
.
He already wasted ten minutes of my life with his last episode of keyboard effluent, why should I waste my time with him anymore?
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Friend, this is Slashdot, posting has never required the reading of an article.
But I see your point QuietLagoon is feeding the troll by responding.
wait, so am I
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What part of "keep reading" didn't your grok?
Let off some steam, Bennett (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess it's kinda cool that you took over what use to be a major tech-news website and turned it into your personal blog.
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So... he took what used to be Commander Taco's personal blog and turned it into his own personal blog... A slight degradation in the quality of the blogging but I'm not sure what my standard deviation or margin of error is on that slide. :-)
Why doesn't Bennett get his OWN blog? (Score:4, Insightful)
That way the rest of us don't have to hear about his bullshit.
Re:Why doesn't Bennett get his OWN blog? (Score:5, Interesting)
This gets brought up constantly, but I've never actually heard the full story.
What is the deal with this? Why does this stuff keep getting posted despite the consistent poor reception? Is Bennett somehow associated with slashdot? Is he getting paid for this?
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It would be dirt simple to write the software for his blog - all you need is a single page where he posts entries. No need for any kind of "display" functionality since it won't be read, anyway.
Re:Why doesn't Bennett get his OWN blog? (Score:4, Insightful)
John Dvorak was guilty of posting well-written articles on interesting topics... and being completely wrong on all the conclusions.
Bennett isn't well-written and doesn't have interesting topics.
I never thought I'd say this, but... "leeaave Johny aloooooooooone!"
Too much math for such a small sample (Score:2)
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I went to music festival on a farm one time, and they had this weird-painted bus by the stage, and a bunch of naked women preached for an hour between bands about the scourge of Nipple Phobia and encouraging all the women to bare their breasts and help people to feel more normal in the presence of nipples.
I'm not sure I agree with everything they said, but I suspect the same people who are against public breastfeeding are okay with pasties-only on TV. Nipple Phobia is real.
Side-boob? No problem. Low-cut top
Small sample sizes, and Correlation IS causation (Score:5, Funny)
Correlation is causation.
For example:
The tides cause the moon. The correlation proves it.
Similarly, murder rates are higher in the summer, and ice cream sales are higher in summer months. Therefore ice cream causes murder.
I hope that was helpful.
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If tylervigen.com [tylervigen.com] has tought me anything it's that you are 100% correct.
For example [tylervigen.com], did you know?
Motorcycle riders killed in collision with stationary object correlates with Corporate Political Action Committees (US)
Obviously PACs are bad for motorcyclists!
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See? Even AC agrees. And, just like Bennett Haselton, he's always right!
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now i know how the onion does it... they had an exclusive deal with bennett... they basically transcribed his view of the world.
voila, humor... unless you're the one that needs to deal with the crazy fucker.
tldr (Score:5, Insightful)
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What's an example of one?
Your second sentence is grammatically incorrect -- "I could spot" instead of "I spotted". ("I could spot" makes no sense, because it sounds as if you were able to spot a certain number of mistakes, but of course you could only know that if you actually did spot them.) It's an understandable error for a non-native-speaker, but it's the kind of thing you should watch out for when you are complaining about other people's grammar...
WTF Bennet??
I can't see any claim by the parent of being grammatically perfect.
The parent doesn't have to be grammatically perfect in order to highlight the many, many mistakes that you have made.
"I could spot" is perfectly valid. If you can't understand this formation, and how it is different from "I spotted", then there really is something wrong with you.
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There's a really good book [amazon.com] that talks about brevity and how to communicate your ideas more concisely with fewer words. I suggest Bennett read it.
A book on brevity is almost 300 pages long.
No doubt brought to you by the author of the Procrastinators Tomb, volumes I - IV.
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Look, give us an exclusion. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but this is getting absurd.
If Slashdot is going to be Bennett "aint I smug and pointless" Haselton's personal blog ....
Give us a STORY EXCLSUION for this clown.
I do not see value in Bennett and hit shit, and I don't care.
But apparently at least samzenpus and timothy with post any of the shit this idiot writes.
Seriously, just fucking make it stop. Nobody here gives a shit about Bennett Haselton. So give us a fucking way to stop reading his crap.
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Bennett is just the latest incarnation of Katz and that other guy before him who I've thankfully forgotten the name of.
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There was someone before Katz? He was like 1999-2002 or so. Slashdot is...what...'96?
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Maybe they came after Katz then. I just remember they were the next prolific mass poster everybody hated.
Re:Look, give us an exclusion. (Score:4, Informative)
Bennett is just the latest incarnation of Katz and that other guy before him who I've thankfully forgotten the name of.
Roland Piquepaille.
Re:Look, give us an exclusion. (Score:4, Funny)
God damn you.
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no such thing as bad publicity.
and i no, i usually start reading the summary before i look at the authoer... and by that point hasselton has already wasted my time. Every fucking time... he tricks me every fucking time.
STOP POSTING BENNET DRIVEL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:STOP POSTING BENNET DRIVEL (Score:4, Funny)
but dude, he's a frequent contributor.
Not even wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
Poisson statistics. I have to wonder if Mr. Haselton has ever heard of the term.
If by some weird alignment of forces I were to become a Judge, and Mr. Haselton presented this to me in a brief, I would try and have him disbarred for abuse of statistical process. I know that the actual legal profession is soft about such abuses, but by God they wouldn't be in my courtroom.
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Here here.
Instead of getting some advice from someone who understand stats, he just vomits out a crappy "justification" as to why his bullshit....erm...is not bullshit.
C'mon Haselton - start here, it's all free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Not even wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
As I said, I included the link to the perl script in the article, so that you don't have to take my word for it about the statistical calculations -- you can run one million trials of the experiment and verify that, under the posited hypothesis, a result similar to the one that occurred will only occur about 2.5% of the time. So the posited hypothesis is probably wrong.
Three minutes before posting this you were smacked down by a statistics prof posting as AC. I recommend you just apologize for having defended your small sample size with bad statistics, and hope people forget in a few years.
I don't get the hate. (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't read his long articles, generally speaking, but he has been an advocate against censorship and I respect that much.
No one makes anyone read the articles, and without even checking, I'd guess you can configure /. not to even show them.
The Haselton hate reminds me of the Jon Katz days, which is kind of amusing ;)
Re:I don't get the hate. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you can't, and that's the problem.
I can't click something and be done with this clown. Because multiple Slashdot editors post his crap.
Short of stringing up some editors, or a lot of really loud angry posts, we do not have any easy means to say "do not wish to see this crap".
Which means you can guarantee every one of this posts will get this kind of response.
If they would give us a check box to say "do not wish to see any shit from Bennett Haselton", that would be preferable. Instead we're all forced to read his opinion on everything.
Hey Bennett, what's your opinion of getting kicked in the nuts? Have you done extensive testing to tell us it hurts?
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How about this - we can block posts by particular editors. Next time one posts a Benshit post, we add them to the list. If enough of them are posting his crap, and enough of us are blocking it, they'll pretty quickly see pageviews go down.
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It may be that it's JUST him. No other contributors get that kind of preferred place, not even people who participate in the community. It's kind of galling to see his name pop up every couple of weeks, and everybody instantly knows that the comments are going to be primarily about just how bad the contribution is, simultaneously wordy and wrong.
Perhaps if Slashdot spread it around a bit more, it might aggravate less. Instead, it's one of a mere two dozen or so stories posted per day. Few of them will be re
Bennet Haselton is a complete charletan (Score:2)
What is this bizarre Slashdot alternate universe, where uninteresting shitposting becomes the headline article? This troll couldn't even reply to his own stupid post, had to make a new one to explain himself.
My Eyeballs are BLEEDING! (Score:4, Funny)
Make it stop, dear God make it stop!
Oh Bennett (Score:2)
Your sample size is the least of my problems.
FOR FUCK'S SAKE SLASHDOT, MAKE IT STOP!
Benet Haselton (Score:2)
Boycott Bennett! (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot by now has OBVIOUSLY seen how much we don't like this guy. The fact that they keep posting him means they're just trolling us, or going for pageviews, or both. Or maybe Bennett has some kind of deal with the site, or has something on one of the editors. Whatever. I don't care. From now on, NO ONE post any comments on one of his stories. Not even to say how much you hate his stories. This will be my last comment on one of his stories. Hope this takes!
Still no, sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
But we can still probably reject any contention that the proportion of such judges is very low. If only 10% of judges were rejecting motions without reading them, then there is only about a 1.4% chance of taking a random sample of six rejected motions and finding that in three or more cases, the judge did not read the motion.
But you DIDN'T HAVE A RANDOM SAMPLE. In particular, you had a sample from Washington State small claims court. So you can ONLY draw conclusions about Washington State small claims court. You have no idea what happens in New York, or in England. But that's only one example of how non-random your sample was. The problem is, ANY small sample is going to have non-random attributes, because it's a small sample. You can roll a dice three times and the results will appear highly non-random - no instances at all of some values - you have to roll it a hundred times to get a good distribution and the dice is random. If you start with a non-random dice - like your "sampling only from one court" or your "using Mechanical Turk" - your small sample size gives you results that are simply MEANINGLESS.
Go and study stats and stop posting this drivel on Slashdot where people might believe it.
You are wrong, again. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can say that but you are wrong.
With a small, non-random sample you cannot say ANYTHING about anything.
Random is not the same as non-random.
A small sample size that is random is NOT THE SAME as a small sample size that is non-random.
Again, your sample was not random.
No matter how many times you try to imply/claim that it was random, it was not random.
Re:Still no, sorry (Score:4, Informative)
You're not helping yourself here, or even defending yourself. You're tripping over your own feet, and making a total clown of yourself.
Small samples have no statistical value for real reasons. Get over yourself and stop thinking you invented a new math that allows small samples to have extra meaning via some clever asshat trick. They don't have value. They don't tell you anything at all about the background population. Small samples are not instructive. Look up the AC statistics professor above who tries to teach you the math that you totally mangled.
Confidence levels (Score:5, Insightful)
Bennett, try this experiment.
Make a program that flips 54 coins and notes the number of heads and the number of tails at each round. Then run this program for one million rounds.
When you're done, note the number of rounds the random generator saw 38 or more heads and frame this as a proportion; ie - "the random generator reached this level X% of the time".
Then compare your results with the random generator. If your results are unlikely to come from the random generator, then perhaps you have something.
Now, " unlikely" is an arbitrary measure with no compelling foundation (it's the wrong measure to determine the significance of a result(*)), but in scientific circles we use a "rule of thumb": results are considered significant when they are less likely than 95% of the random results.
Even at this level, we expect 1-in-20 studies to be due to random chance, but then follow-on studies should confirm or deny the findings (and 1-in-20x20 of *those* will be due to random chance as well).
If the results might lead to potentially catastrophic decisions we might use a higher level of significance; for example, 99% confidence when deciding whether a drug is safe. Physics uses an insanely high [physics.org] level of confidence.
Try that and get back to us - we await your next post with baited breath.
(*) The correct measure is the number of bits saved by compressing the original data by factoring out the result (glossing over some details).
Re:Confidence levels (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude! News for nerds indeed. Try using this command in R: 1-pbinom(38,54,.50). You will find that the probability of getting 38 or more heads in 54 trials is approximately 0.0007481294. There are plenty of things wrong with the lump of stupid in the blog post above, but at least get the math right.
Part of explaining something is knowing your audience.
Telling someone to type a command in R doesn't explain *why* typing that command works, or what's going on in the background.
And yes, there's things wrong with the post, but Bennett is most definitely NOT A STATISTICIAN. You don't saturate a beginner with all the gory details - you start from the basics and work up.
Part of explaining something is knowing your audience. Practice explaining things to people and you, too, will figure that out.
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Geeze man, part of explaining something is knowing your audience.
What part of "1-pbinom(38,54,.50)" didn't you get? Do you even know where you are?
~halfSarcasm
Re:Confidence levels (Score:4)
First, that's "bated breath". You don't catch fish with your breath.
Let me see if I've got this straight:
Extrapolate meaningless results from poorly constructed test - CHECK
Post gargantuan explanation of how "good" you are at statistics - CHECK
Dismiss rebuttals with spelling and grammar checks - CHECK
Three for three! You get something from the top row.
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There are two hard things in computer science: race conditions, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
It's a straightforward proportions test! (Score:2, Informative)
Bennett, what the hell are you doing? This is a straightforward difference between proportions test. In R it's simply
> prop.test(c(36,38),c(47,54))
which gives a 95% confidence interval for the difference as (-0.13 to 0.25), meaning loosely that we wouldn't be terribly surprised if the white women were thought to be inappropriate at 13 percentage points higher or if the black women were thought to be inappropriate at 25 percentage points higher.
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Dude, it's not even that. Bennett is saying that ethnicity has a significant impact on whether people find breastfeeding inappropriate. Run a fucking t-test.
Here: http://www.graphpad.com/quickc... [graphpad.com]
Ban it! (Score:3)
Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bennett Haselton (born November 20, 1978) is a frequent commenter on the website Slashdot.org, where he is widely disliked by readers [wikipedia.org].
Wow. Just wow. There are some real gems in that article:
What the hell kind of idiot thinks things like this? He obviously does not understand human expression or language (hence the 1M line diatribes). Most of the content of his Wikipedia entry c
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I think you just raised the bar on this "hate on bennett" thing. Hope it doesn't escalate from there...
Douglas Held -- not me -- added the line to wikipedia. I merely saw the sentence when I googled to find out who the heck this Bennett guy is.
Breast-feeding . . . *what* ? (Score:2)
I mean, a picture of a black woman or a white woman breast-feeding her baby wouldn't interest me.
A picture of a black woman or a white woman simultaneously breast-feeding both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton would interest me. That would be a hoot and a half.
Quotes from the romp . . .
"I did NOT suckle on that woman!"
"Who said anything about breast milk costing $4 a gallon?"
I've tried to offend both major political parties in the US with this post. I could try to also offend the Libertarians, Green
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What is ths person was breast feeding http://satans.xxx/wtf/colbert-... [satans.xxx]
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wasn't that hw? the gallon of milk think
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I've tried to offend both major political parties in the US with this post. I could try to also offend the Libertarians, Greens, or Tea Party folks . . . but there don't seem to be enough breasts to go around!
You should have gone for a Total Recall reference, then. Missed opportunity.
The third parties will just have to share.
my gripe (Score:2)
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Sample accuracy Sample size (Score:2)
Slashdot is not your blog. Go away. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bigger sample size in comments section (Score:5, Insightful)
It was bad enough that the first sorry the other day had NOTHING whatsoever to do with news for nerds, nor was it well written, nor was it well conducted.
But
Few people care about this Miley Cyrus' opinion on things that do matter, and fewer still care about his opinion on all the crap that doesn't matter.
Breastfeeding pictures? Burning Man parking? Burning Man Ice distribution? How come 5th Ammendment?
Fuck this clown.
I love Bennett Haselton ... (Score:2)
... because every time he posts, it's the great American novel, about the page count of War and Peace, and I read one once.
ONCE!
Sure, his stuff is fucked up, but it's become an iconic meme and I love to see it appear.
Scanning through the comments is a pop-corn and Dr. Pepper moment and humor abounds nd I m greatly amused.
To Bennett Haselton: I want you to have my babies and stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
What surprises me is that he keeps coming back for more and Slashdots editors keep letting him.
I can't help but think he'd be an interesting guy to meet at least once. I'd rather talk to someone with ideas and opinions I don't like that someone without any of either.
It isn't the size that counts (Score:2)
Your "fun picture" at a "department party" or whatever (I RTFirstA but not this justification drivel)
Impeach /. editor samzenpus (Score:2)
Background info/learning resource: Coursera course (Score:2)
Even though this course has "public health" in the title, it is really quite generic. The methods used and very(!) well explained by the very likable John McGready (Johns Hopkins University) are exactly the same as what is relevant to understand for what is being discussed here.
Statistical Reasoning for Public Health 1: Estimation, Inference, & Interpretation
A conceptual and interpretive public health approach to some of the most commonly used methods from basic statistics.
https://www.coursera.org/cours [coursera.org]
Horrible, just horrible. (Score:2)
I'm not sure why /. is posting the ramblings of a non-researcher, non-statistician as though he knew what he was talking about.
Has it gotten to this? Really?
Bennett took 1,800+ words to describe what a normal research would take under 100 to say. This is what happens when someone thinks they know what they're talking about, and need to rationalize the heck out of it in order to make sense.
Request for Bennett to look into (Score:2)
I'd like to know what percentage of people at Burning Man are offended by various women breastfeeding, and also how we can optimize the queues so that everyone can see it happen without waiting too long.
Painfully illogical (Score:2)
By analogy, the fact that my ice cream truck only sells half as much ice cream as I expect doesn't tell me that there aren't many kids in the neighborhood. Maybe my prices are crazy. Maybe my only flavor is chocolate-chutney ripple. Maybe the scary clown on the top of my truck frightens children away. From looking at my in
Re:Bennett!!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Fried post.
No kidding. Who is Bennett, and why does he get to use /. as his blog? What happened to WP:NOTBLOG?
Re: (Score:3)
I have no idea. I have never seen him write a thing that was actually of interest or value, but so far as I can tell, anything he writes is automatically approved by Slashdot. He's guaranteed front-page placement. What is going on here? Who is he, and why does Slashdot owe him this?
Re:Bennett!!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
But why is Bennett's garbage being approved? I understand slashvertisements, because there is at least a monetary benefit to posting them. I also understand some pseudoscience occasionally slipping by, because the editor didn't read it carefully. But this crap? It is obvious shit from beginning to end. He has nothing to say. It is just completely pointless.
Re: (Score:2)
Op-ed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Slashdot's exclusive original content that distinguishes it from everyone else is the comments and community.
The columnists are:
eldavojohn (898314)
Samantha Wright (1324923)
phantomfive (622387)
And all the rest.
Their lengthy opinion pieces are stored under the not-read-so-much "journal" section of slashdot. But mostly it's just the comment sections.
If the DICE overlords wanted something more "traditional" they HAVE the resources at hand to give out front-page space to people with the writing skills, technical
Emergency, emergency... (Score:3)
Haselton has gone meta.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it really?
It _used_ to be, but then at some point (seemingly unnoticed and unannounced) they stopped publishing the code. The old stuff is still there, and it's what was used to start up soylentnews, but I don't think slashdot in it's current form is open source any more (feel free to correct me/point me at source code if wrong).