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Right, so as I'm reading all the highly intelligent replies (which don't actually say anything apart from 'we're right you're wrong'), I can see that 2 of 30 in the same room sharing a birthday is a definite statistical probability, whereas 2 from 40 sharing the same christian and (uncommon) surname is simply too absurd to be considered a statistic.
Truth be told, both are simply coincidences, bugger all to do with statistics.
P.S. question regarding members birthdays still not answered
Right, so as I'm reading all the highly intelligent replies (which don't actually say anything apart from 'we're right you're wrong'), I can see that 2 of 30 in the same room sharing a birthday is a definite statistical probability, whereas 2 from 40 sharing the same christian and (uncommon) surname is simply too absurd to be considered a statistic.
Truth be told, both are simply coincidences, bugger all to do with statistics.
Hugh showed you how it statistically works. It's because you're not looking if one specific birthday is shared by another person, it's if any person shares a birthday with anyone else. So when you reach 23 people you have 253 possible combinations of dates (23 * 22 / 2) in a year.
I don't understand why you're going on about names. It's not the same principle.
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Re: All those No.10 lockdown parties
Quote:
Originally Posted by Carth
Right, so as I'm reading all the highly intelligent replies (which don't actually say anything apart from 'we're right you're wrong'), I can see that 2 of 30 in the same room sharing a birthday is a definite statistical probability, whereas 2 from 40 sharing the same christian and (uncommon) surname is simply too absurd to be considered a statistic.
Truth be told, both are simply coincidences, bugger all to do with statistics.
P.S. question regarding members birthdays still not answered
. . . and probably won't be
Your verbosity is a very thin disguise for your refusal to understand the way these things work. As I said earlier, accessible introductions to the discipline are out there and easy to find and read, if you so choose.
Sorry if you’re finding your demands for the rest of us to do your homework for you are going unfulfilled but that’s your lookout. Statistics is applied maths, and in the case of opinion polling it produces useful results, provided the techniques are correctly followed and the caveats properly understood and allowed for. It isn’t guesswork, no matter how many times you’ve heard your local pub bore declaring it to be the case.
Right, so as I'm reading all the highly intelligent replies (which don't actually say anything apart from 'we're right you're wrong'), I can see that 2 of 30 in the same room sharing a birthday is a definite statistical probability, whereas 2 from 40 sharing the same christian and (uncommon) surname is simply too absurd to be considered a statistic.
Truth be told, both are simply coincidences, bugger all to do with statistics.
P.S. question regarding members birthdays still not answered
. . . and probably won't be
Here you go…
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Re: All those No.10 lockdown parties
82% of statistics are made up - Vic Reeves.
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MPs today passed a motion setting up an official inquiry by the Commons privileges committee without a vote after a government U-turn in the face of a rebellion from their own backbenches.
With only minutes to go before MPs were due to debate the issue, ministers announced that they were dropping an amendment designed to delay the vote on whether the prime minister should be investigated.
The sudden change is a sign of the scale of anger and frustration among Conservative MPs at the Downing Street parties scandal.
In a grave blow to Johnson, one of the Conservative Party’s most influential backbenchers told Johnson during today’s debate that “the gig’s up”.
Steve Baker, a former minister and a passionate Eurosceptic who backed Johnson’s leadership campaign in 2019, had said as recently as Tuesday that the prime minister “could not have made a more humble apology”.
But today he said that his feeling of “forgiveness” evaporated 90 seconds into Johnson’s appearance before Conservative backbenchers on Tuesday night, which Baker lambasted as “an orgy of adulation, a festival of bombast”.
And this from one of his biggest supporters…
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top answer Hugh, well done, it does appear that many people REALLY don't understand
Anyway, that's enough from me, you lot carry on defending your faith in statistics
I see you have proven that it is statistically possible to wind up the forum's mansplainer's with a few well worded post's
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Re: All those No.10 lockdown parties
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugh
Statistics is not the same as guesswork, no matter how many times you say it…
The problem a lot of people have with Statistics (as a Branch of Mathematics) is that it can often be counterintuitive, which can confuse people (because they find it difficult to understand, they dismiss it).
For example, how many people would have to be in a room before it was likely there would be two with the same birthday?
The mathematics of a static situation (30 people in a room) seems to me to have little/no relevance to an survey/poll conducted with a population sample.
The survey companies have a very large pool of people who represent the demographic shape of the country and then use a proportion of that pool, I believe picked at random, to answer whatever the survey is about. Any shortfall in the demographic profile arising from the random selection is adjusted by the "normalisation" process when the surveys are in.
Whereas the birthday probability calculation is entirely mathematical, survey/polls have a significant subjective element applied to them.
Hugh's comparison is of very limited value, though the example he gave is interesting.
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---------- Post added at 19:11 ---------- Previous post was at 18:43 ----------
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Right, so as I'm reading all the highly intelligent replies (which don't actually say anything apart from 'we're right you're wrong'), I can see that 2 of 30 in the same room sharing a birthday is a definite statistical probability, whereas 2 from 40 sharing the same christian and (uncommon) surname is simply too absurd to be considered a statistic.
Truth be told, both are simply coincidences, bugger all to do with statistics.
P.S. question regarding members birthdays still not answered
. . . and probably won't be
Would only take 2 people if my mate took his eldest son to the pub His wife did her put down when he suggested Calling his second and third son Mick too
The mathematics of a static situation (30 people in a room) seems to me to have little/no relevance to an survey/poll conducted with a population sample.
The survey companies have a very large pool of people who represent the demographic shape of the country and then use a proportion of that pool, I believe picked at random, to answer whatever the survey is about. Any shortfall in the demographic profile arising from the random selection is adjusted by the "normalisation" process when the surveys are in.
Whereas the birthday probability calculation is entirely mathematical, survey/polls have a significant subjective element applied to them.
Hugh's comparison is of very limited value, though the example he gave is interesting.
This ^^
Although this part of the conversation was triggered by my indifference specifically to YouGov.
They don’t randomly ask 2000 or 1000 people, they ask 2000 or 1000 people “specifically chosen” from a database of “recruited” registered YouGov respondents.
Quote:
Panel members are recruited from a host of different sources, including via standard advertising, and strategic partnerships with a broad range of websites.
Nothing “random” about it, so you can throw that Gaussian Curve out the window.
I’m not saying it is……but you could quite easily skew a result by selecting your respondents.
You may read the attached and think that’s all fine, and if properly managed and overseen it may be.
But……importantly…..it’s not random. It’s like getting a lucky dip in the lottery, those numbers are computer generated and anything computer generated is not random.
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But……importantly…..it’s not random. It’s like getting a lucky dip in the lottery, those numbers are computer generated and anything computer generated is not random.
Not true. There are many ways to get computers to generate truly random numbers.
Also whilst it's true most implementations of a standard random number algorithms in programming aren't truly random they pretty much are for the purposes we're talking about here. For picking from datasets, i.e a population, pseudo-random is fine. It's not going to be biased to a pre-determined outcome whereas if you were doing a coin-toss betting game there would be an advantage to knowing what seeded the random number generator (and what the generator was).
But polling clearly works. YouGov called the last election as Tories: 43%. They got 44%. Labour: 33%. They got 34%.
It's not precise. There are limitations. But it's not bad and it's the best we have outside of elections. It's certainly better than our own biases, political commentators or anecdotal evidence from our social circles.
If Remainers listened to polling rather than Twitter the Brexit vote wouldn't be such a shock. If Labour had listened to the polls rather than assume everyone loves Corbyn they would have gotten rid of him before December 2019.
Failed election campaigns almost always a mantra into why the polls are wrong.
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