On 4/12/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
I'm just saying in terms of the likelihood of somebody speaking English who said they were born in "Georgia". The odds are just statistically higher that somebody saying that, knowing nothing else about the context in which it was said, were born in the US state than in the Eastern European country. I of course don't mean that to be much of a convincing argument, but it was something which occurred to me in response to an earlier comment.
You actually just accidentally distorted the argument (originally, the person born in Georgia wasn't necessarily an English speaker), but it's not too important. This discussion convinces me that slight differences in how we define the goals of this project, its biases, how we measure masses of people, etc, can lead to significant differences in outcome.
Imagine, for example that instead of a 60-60 on the poll, the result had been 40-80. Or, it had been advertised on other Wikipedias (as if it mattered that much). Or something.
Steve