On Fri, 20 Sep 2019 07:47:34 -0700 (PDT), Cindy Hamilton
wrote:

On Friday, September 20, 2019 at 10:22:06 AM UTC-4, rbowman wrote:
On 09/20/2019 04:32 AM, Cindy Hamilton wrote:
I recall my first job. I worked for a man studying renal adenocarcinoma
in frogs as a model for human cancer (unless you'd prefer to induce cancer
in humans for research). I typed endless statistical analyses of the
data.

When I was in college I worked summers for the state Department of
Education. They crunched a lot of numbers trying to formulate state wide
high school exams that would result in a pleasing bell curve. Sometimes
they succeeded. The crunching part was quite literal since they used
Friden square root calculators;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnmj9EzKgtg

That model isn't the square root variety but is very similar.

My memory of my statistics course was the chief use was determining how
many blivits you needed to test to insure only 5% of the blivits you
sold were junk. The 5% number varied depending on the cost of replacing
defective units and ****ing off customers.

That certainly was a very specific statistics course. Or your memory
of it was very specific.

It was a long time ago but my gut feeling is 1000 out of some 300+
million isn't a valid sample.

I can't quite recall the details. However, Scientific American was
kind enough to fill in the gaps in my memory:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/howcan-a-poll-of-only-100/

Cindy Hamilton

They point out the flaw in the first few paragraphs.

"You must first assume that the survey respondents have been sampled
at random from the population, meaning that people are selected one at
a time, with all persons in the U.S. being equally likely to be picked
at each point. For most polls, this is approximated by calling phone
numbers generated randomly by computer".

When a certain segment of the population will not talk to anyone on a
robo call, you are not random anymore. It is a better poll of how many
people are gullible enough to be scammed on the phone. Those people
are also more likely to take what they hear on TV as gospel.