[WikiEN-l] Samiharris looks like a sock, and everyone suspected

[Relata Refero]

On Feb 13, 2008 11:37 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> So, where is the justification for outrage here? Easy - there is none.
> The 'problem' springs from folks who are righteously offended by the
> transgression against our bureaucracy, but both the transgression and
> the bureaucracy are of little importance next to the point - the
> published content. Remember that we are real people, generally adults,
> who live in the real world. Sometimes we get caught up in our
> processes and view events in our little world as if they had
> significance in the wider world - but they don't. Only the product has
> significance in the real world.


I don't really care about the product, I care about the fact that this has
pissed off so many people that the little battles they've fought over it
have spilled all over the project and made everyone else's time miserable.
Somebody needs to ensure that doesn't happen again.


>
>
> Having said that! Focusing on the actual evidence here - I'm not a
> mathematician or an expert in statistical analysis, and few of the
> folks working on this analytical project are either. However, it is
> clear to me that the sample suffers from a number of mathematical
> problems - mostly relating to its size and selection, and the
> significance attached to the results. If you want to make a
> comprehensive declaration based on this type of analysis, you need a
> much more robust set of data to work with and a much more serious
> approach to mining it for significant data points.
>
> Nathan
>

Err, you'll have to expand on that. I have some fairly advanced statistical
training, and I see several problems with the collinearity here, but its a
pretty good rough reckoner, and - as I said - light years ahead of anything
I'd seen before.

Definitely, 10 data points is too small, but in the interleaving  comparison
in particular, the difference is stark enough that I don't think the degrees
of freedom matter. And what do you mean by "serious approach"?

RR