Height Men!?

[Piratecat]

6'2". Cower before my lordly stature.

Let me get this straight. You're born on the same day and year as I am, AND you're the exact same height?

My long-lost twin brother!

 

[Mycanid]

Let me get this straight. You're born on the same day and year as I am, AND you're the exact same height?

My long-lost twin brother!

Are you bald though?

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Let me get this straight. You're born on the same day and year as I am, AND you're the exact same height?

My long-lost twin brother!

I'm the evil one, right?

 

[kenobi65]

How big does the sample have to be to be free of bias? What is sampling bias anyway? (I do Statistics 1 at school, so I'm curious)

(Stats hat on; I do market research for a living)

There's something called the "Law of Large Numbers"; when your sample gets big enough, you can feel fairly confident that the results you see in the sample are going to be pretty similar (though not necessarily identical) to the results you'd see if you did a census (that is, if you got an answer from everyone in the population)*.

Generally speaking, once your sample size gets to the 200 to 300 range, you don't see a whole lot more precision from adding additional responses. OTOH, results from a sample that's substantially under 100 (as this poll currently has) are fairly likely to differ substantially from the result you'd get in a census.

And, actually, "sampling bias" may not have been the best choice of words here. What I talked about above is just an issue of a small sample size. Technically, "sampling bias" is a situation in which your results may not be accurate / predictive, because you didn't get a good sample of the entire population. For example, every time you see people here talk about "well, that can't be true of D&D players, because no one here on EN World does that!", that's sampling bias. EN World isn't a represenative sample of D&D players, and thus, using what EN Worlders say, and assuming you can project that out to the broader population of "all D&D players", is a flawed assumption.

* - Assuming that your sample is representative. Polls in which people choose whether or not to answer are notoriously un-representative, because there's no way to tell whether the people who seek out the poll and answer it are the same or different from those who didn't see it, or chose not to answer it.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Are you bald though?

Get him drunk enought at GenCon and something can be arranged.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

I'm 5'8".

 

[RangerWickett]

I'm about 5'5". As RangerWickett can tell you, that's pretty short!

Okay, I have been reminded of the incident. Clearly what I was intending to say was, "Wow, Eric Noah! I didn't think you'd be so sh------shamelessly awesome!"

 

[Mycanid]

Get him drunk enought at GenCon and something can be arranged.

Yoikes!

[fungus slinks away wondering what future mischief he may have catalysted! ]

 

[Angel Tarragon]

[fungus slinks away wondering what future mischief he may have catalysted! ]

I believe the correcte word is 'catalyzed'.

 

[Ferret]

(Stats hat on; I do market research for a living)

There's something called the "Law of Large Numbers"; when your sample gets big enough, you can feel fairly confident that the results you see in the sample are going to be pretty similar (though not necessarily identical) to the results you'd see if you did a census (that is, if you got an answer from everyone in the population)*.

Generally speaking, once your sample size gets to the 200 to 300 range, you don't see a whole lot more precision from adding additional responses. OTOH, results from a sample that's substantially under 100 (as this poll currently has) are fairly likely to differ substantially from the result you'd get in a census.

And, actually, "sampling bias" may not have been the best choice of words here. What I talked about above is just an issue of a small sample size. Technically, "sampling bias" is a situation in which your results may not be accurate / predictive, because you didn't get a good sample of the entire population. For example, every time you see people here talk about "well, that can't be true of D&D players, because no one here on EN World does that!", that's sampling bias. EN World isn't a representative sample of D&D players, and thus, using what EN Worlders say, and assuming you can project that out to the broader population of "all D&D players", is a flawed assumption.

* - Assuming that your sample is representative. Polls in which people choose whether or not to answer are notoriously un-representative, because there's no way to tell whether the people who seek out the poll and answer it are the same or different from those who didn't see it, or chose not to answer it.

Thanks! That all makes sense, but we really only get onto the crunchy stuff, at school.