Comment Re:Story meaning? (Score 1) 313
First statistics lesson I ever had, first thing the professor did was make an estimate based on 10 people about the whole population. He was correct, by the way. He went on to rant that anything that uses large amounts of people (by which he meant more than at most a few dozen) was not proper statistics. If you simply count everybody, it should be called "counting", you see, not statistics.
How is using 1.67^-7 percent of the population (10 out of 60 000 000) better than using 1.96^-5 percent (1176 out of 60 000 000)? Not to set up a strawman here, but are you saying that this estimation would be more accurate if they had used only 10 people?
It'd be absurd to make estimations about a population as large as this using 10 people. 1176 is still small enough to not be "counting", yet would provide much more accurate estimates.