May quotes

[Vandiablo]

Really? Read all five thousand of them, did you?

Actually, if we know the distribution, he would need a much smaller sample size than 5000. Heck, his claim only requires that 2776 posts of yours seem to aim to offend.

Or rather, that the probability of seeming to aim to offend P(STATO) exceeds .5.

P(STATO) > .5

While 100% confidence interval is Sn >= 2776, the 99% CI would be much lower.

But we have to know the distribution STATO follows. In your (Occhi's) case, it's pretty obvious that the Normal distribution does not apply. Fortunately, there's an easier distribution to use. For acerbic posters, STATO can be closely approximated by using the Poison distribution.*

This distribution is such that the mean level can be determined in just 3 posts, because of the tendency of meanness to be constant.

The 3 posts you provided, we assume, were not chosen randomly, so are therefore biased, so no point in even looking at them. We need to pick a random sample. Luckily with the Poison distribution, the randomness needed is to just use the first few posts that a forum reader happens to see.

-V

*This is similar to the Poisson distribution but is not as fishy and has more mean.