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Alex's avatar

Well we can never know whether what we observe is due to chance/how closely our observations of a small part of a population map to the whole population.

I don't know how Steve arrived at his figures, but I'm sure if he were to explain, then the method would be logically and mathematically sound.

If you were to shoot a shotgun into a flock of birds and you knew roughly the size of the flock, you could look at the ratio of dead red birds to green birds and construct a bell curve of possible ratios of red to green in the actual flock. If your ratio is 20 to 1 red to green, it becomes increasingly less likely that the actual ratio in the flock is the ratio (15, 12, 9, 5 etc to 1) as you move away from that number.

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