I understood your position to begin with. But can you see that the way in which you presented your statistically analysis to me might have seemed somewhat offensive? Even if you had just preluded the link with a brief word like "Here’s some minor stats analysis i’ve done to show how unlikely this is" I wouldn’t have responded so brashly.
It’s a frequent habit of mine to link to posts on my thread without further comment since the link usually contains everything I want to say on the subject and it saves me the time of having to write a preamble for situations that pop up frequently. I didn’t stop to think that you might consider the title offensive since the original post (Your Friends Are Full Of Bullshit) was from five months before this PE on TV thread even began so there was no way I could have written it or chosen the title with you or your friends in mind.
As for the conclusion of your thread being justified, well, it looks like its based on fairly sound information. However, in the same way that you were offended that I disregarded your stats analysis, I found it obtuse that you so brasenly disregarded the effort that I had gone to in an effort to explain that it wasn’t merely a bunch of mates go to a bar and start bragging about how big they are.
The beauty of math is that it strips away particulars that aren’t relevant. I framed the original scenario in the post as a story involving guys in a club but that really doesn’t matter. It could have been men in a locker room, a doctor’s office, an army barracks, or anywhere else (as long as the sampling is random—-choosing from guys on a porn set wouldn’t work). The state of mind of the men (whether they are bragging or not) or your degree of connection to them (clearly strong in this case) isn’t relevant to the analysis. In fact, we don’t even need to deal with men. The problem could have been one involving lengths of sticks or colors of marbles and the math would have been conceptually the same. I thought that would have been clear, but I guess not. I’ll explain that better next time.
I’m here to make friends and share my experiences, not step on people’s toes. Logic is a great thing, I appreaciate your efforts to use it to help people, all I can say is in this case you came off as a little insensitive.To be honest, I thought that my reply was so retarded that you’d take it as a joke, which it partially was. Contrary to what the nature of this discussion has seemed to be, I generally try to remain light-hearted, but I think I’ve failed to do that to my usual standards here. I apologise :)
Using emoticons is good. It helps to make up for the absence of the social cues we rely on in face-to-face interactions to avoid misunderstanding. Something like "Your Chart Is Full Of Bullshit :D " would have gone over much better since then I would have known it was at least partially a joke.
Is my position clear now? :pP.S.
Yes, we’re cool. Sorry for calling you an asshole. I was just ticked off at your reply.
I will eventually, somehow, get true measurements from them. Even if it takes hidden web cams, perhaps. Then I will coem rampaging back onto the boards and tell everyone, but mostly you, whether it turned out to be bullshit or not :D
Your situation is a little different, quantitatively speaking, from the post on my thread since this involves three men rather than six. The qualitative conclusions are still valid, however. If we redo the numbers for this case, we get:
Small-Medium / Big : Probability
- 0 / 3 : 0.4%
- 1 / 2 : 6.4%
- 2 / 1 : 33.7%
- 3 / 0 : 59.6%
Good luck on getting measurements.
