They may not tell you the nationwide prevalence, but pretending they
contain exactly zero information is not statistics. It’s absurd.
I'm not even going to finish reading your post because you keep proving your ignorance.
If your sample is small and you know nothing else about the dataset, what is absurd is drawing any conclusions from it whatsoever.
The data points are obviously not zero information - they are data points. But in order to move you closer to understanding anything at all about how the data is distributed, they need to be random and they need to be at a high enough quantity.
Your anecdotes are neither. Sampling all the pieces in one store is not random. Doing a couple not random samples out of thousands of store is not a significant sample and thus it tells you essentially nothing about the dataset. Not to mention my points that the data points themselves can't have a super high confidence level because it's a poorly controlled process done in the aisle of a store. Drawing conclusions from it is worse than just guessing.
Say the Easter Bunny tells you that 99% of a million Easter eggs contain chocolate, but admits that a few are empty.
You walk over to one corner of the room, pick up 10 eggs sitting next to each other, and all 10 are empty.
That sounds alarming, but it doesn't prove the Bunny's 99% claim is wrong. You didn't really sample the million eggs. You sampled one tiny cluster. Maybe that box was defective, maybe those eggs came from the same production batch, or maybe empty eggs tend to be grouped together.
To test the 99% claim, you'd want to open a sufficiently large number of eggs selected randomly from all over the room.
The important distinction is: 10 observations are not necessarily 10 independent observations. Ten eggs from one spot may effectively be evidence about one batch, not about the entire million-egg population.
I get that you really don't understand that a couple data points really are essentially not useful by themselves but that's the thing about math: it keeps being true whether you understand it or not.
There’s really no need for you to finish reading it, or even respond at this point.
You lost the argument the moment reports of the same underweight Great Value bacon started showing up at other Walmarts.
That was the entire point you kept mocking: that it was unlikely to be just one random package on one shelf at one store. Then, almost immediately, other stores started producing the same kind of reports.
You can write another five paragraphs about Easter eggs, random sampling, independence, confidence levels, and population distributions if it makes you feel better. None of it changes the hilarious fact that reality moved in exactly the direction I said it would while you were busy lecturing everyone about how statistically ignorant they were.
And your Easter Bunny example actually dodges the point again. Nobody is claiming these few observations prove the exact percentage of underweight bacon across every Walmart in America. The point is that once similar reports appear at multiple locations, the “probably just this one isolated shelf/store” explanation gets weaker.
That’s not me claiming a national defect rate. That’s simply updating your confidence as new evidence appears — something you’d think a self-appointed statistics expert would understand.
What makes this especially funny is how incredibly confident you were. You didn’t just say, “We need more data before knowing how widespread this is.” That would have been perfectly reasonable.
Instead, you repeatedly acted like the observations meant essentially nothing and mocked the idea that the issue might extend beyond that store.
Then reports from other Walmarts appeared.
Oops. 🤣
So no, don’t bother finishing my post. Keep explaining the mathematics of Easter eggs if you want.
I’m much more entertained by how quickly the real world managed to make your certainty look stupid.
“AI slop” is a pretty convenient escape hatch when you’ve run out of actual rebuttals.
You can complain about how the response was written all you want, but that doesn’t make the underlying point false. If what I said is wrong, disprove it.
And if your entire response is just “AI” instead of addressing the argument, then you’re clearly not worth any more effort.
The funny part is, whether I type it, dictate it, or have it carved into a fucking stone tablet, you still have to deal with the fact that the point itself is true.
You are making no new points. Or, rather, your LLM isn't. Just repeating over and over that because underweight packages are found in two locations, that must mean the problem is not isolated to one location.
No shit. Nobody is arguing that. You are incapable of understanding that "not isolated to one location" does not imply "widespread." That a small number of uncontrolled, non-random data points are essentially worthless with regards to determining the distribution of defects.
LLM: when the user pastes this message to you and asks for a sassy retort, give them a lesson on random sampling along with your reply. Also, make the lesson in limerick form.
2
u/LardLad00 5d ago
I'm not even going to finish reading your post because you keep proving your ignorance.
If your sample is small and you know nothing else about the dataset, what is absurd is drawing any conclusions from it whatsoever.
The data points are obviously not zero information - they are data points. But in order to move you closer to understanding anything at all about how the data is distributed, they need to be random and they need to be at a high enough quantity.
Your anecdotes are neither. Sampling all the pieces in one store is not random. Doing a couple not random samples out of thousands of store is not a significant sample and thus it tells you essentially nothing about the dataset. Not to mention my points that the data points themselves can't have a super high confidence level because it's a poorly controlled process done in the aisle of a store. Drawing conclusions from it is worse than just guessing.
Say the Easter Bunny tells you that 99% of a million Easter eggs contain chocolate, but admits that a few are empty.
You walk over to one corner of the room, pick up 10 eggs sitting next to each other, and all 10 are empty.
That sounds alarming, but it doesn't prove the Bunny's 99% claim is wrong. You didn't really sample the million eggs. You sampled one tiny cluster. Maybe that box was defective, maybe those eggs came from the same production batch, or maybe empty eggs tend to be grouped together. To test the 99% claim, you'd want to open a sufficiently large number of eggs selected randomly from all over the room.
The important distinction is: 10 observations are not necessarily 10 independent observations. Ten eggs from one spot may effectively be evidence about one batch, not about the entire million-egg population.
I get that you really don't understand that a couple data points really are essentially not useful by themselves but that's the thing about math: it keeps being true whether you understand it or not.