The (statistical) Truth About Cock Size

This study is probably not a good indicator of penis size in the world. While it’s fun to throw numbers around, they must be taken with the understanding that they can lie (when used or evaluated improperly).

This is how a study needs to be done. First, data must be compiled randomly over the entire sample space (far easier said than done). Once you have data, you can calculate the mean and standard deviation. If the number of sample points is large enough, you can approximate this random variable with the normal distribution via the central limit theorem.

This study, from what I can tell, pretty much violated every possible matter concerning the extremely general outline above. The study made no attempt to be random. Period. The study also made no attempt to collect data from the entire sample space (i.e. the world). Further, the study made no attempt to make the number of persons measured large enough. Three-hundred people is but a drop in the bucket when considering a worldwide distribution that includes a few billion penises.

Essentially, any conclusions drawn from the study are novelty figures that “probably” (in a probabilistic sense) are incorrect with respect to estimating the world-wide distribution. The study was a publicity stunt, not an actual scientific survey.

The truth is that we don’t need this information anyway. Would we be any bigger just because we knew we were below, at or above average? No. What other people are doing and what their size is simply does not matter. Statistically, our penises are independent and therefore our covariance is 0. This means our penis size doesn’t affect each others size, neither positively nor negatively. So instead of labeling our size and obsessing over numbers (especially the numbers of others), just make it bigger.

It’s funny that they don’t mention girth in there. Although I am 1 in 741 for length, I know women like the girth. My girlfriend was saying today ‘short and thick, does the trick’. Funny because before starting PE I always thought length was the way to go, now I’m chasing that elusive girth.

Good luck finding any single study published in a medical journal that does this. If the Lifestyles study was the only one ever done on penis size, then yeah, drawing any strong conclusions from it would be hasty, especially given the self-selection of the population. But many studies have been done, on populations including Italians, Jordanian, Iranians, Greeks, Indians, Israelis, Germans, Nigerians, Turks, Brits, and Koreans — and some of these with relatively random sampling (e.g., the Italian one randomly sampling 3,300 young military men). The averages for different populations do vary somewhat — the Indian and Korean studies showed a notably shorter average length, perhaps due to nutritional or genetic differences — but no study has shown an average bigger than the one found in the Lifestyles study. Using the mean and SD from this study is therefore probably overly conservative, if anything, if a guy wants to know how he stacks up peniswise.

Population size makes no difference vis-a-vis the sample size needed to produce a confidence interval of whatever narrowness you desire. (Unless you’re dealing with samples that are a signifcant proportion of the population — more than, say, 5 or 10% — in which case you can throw in the finite population correction factor.)

Its probably not as accurate when you expand the target to “the world” but its still certainly an excellent indicator, since there is more variance within groups than between groups, at least when it comes to population studies that measures actual genetic distances and relationships. I’d assume you could pick this study up and go to any country and find more variance within the same sample group than you would find between that group and this group from Cancun.

The power of a study of this type is the ability to measure the parameters of a group, and by extrapolation make some assumptions about other groups. Which have not been shown to vary much.

I would disagree that the study isn’t random. It wasn’t selected, except by the participants (ie, nobody was picked out ahead of time, given an invitation, or picked from a roster or list). Its not completely random because guys with bigger dicks are more likely to enter. So its got an upward bias. It was an open to the public event. Three hundred people is an excellent sample size for the purposes for which we’re using it. Yes there are a lot more people that three hundred in the world, but the odds of an outlier being in the sample aren’t bad. There is a 100 percent change of a guy in the 1/300 level being in the sample. There is a 50/50 chance of a guy at the 1 in 600 level being in the sample, and a 25% chance of a guy who is 1 in 1200, proverbial, the one in a thousand guy, being there. Those are just the raw numbers, but in fact the probablity of getting the big guys rockets up, because the bigger they are, the more, presumably, they want to be in this thing.

But your other point makes no sense to me. We don’t live in a vacuum with no competition. We are here because we want to be bigger (bigger than WHAT)…the other guys. Hence we need to know what the data is.

Why does your girlfriend say short and thick? are you long and skinny?

“Outliers” can greatly affect statistics. Here is a good article about that here .

There are lots of people here on Thunder’s from all over the world. That is why I took it from a world-wide viewpoint.

Gotta go.

In a penis size study outliers are going to be on both sides of the spectrum - small and big. It could be stated that a 7.5 penis is more likely than a 3.5 penis, and therefore have more of a pull on determining average size, but even then it’s not as great an affect as one might think. In the height vs penis size poll, after 1000 votes this was the result (there are over 1300 votes now):

1000 votes

—————-<4.99"——————5-5.99"——————-6-6.99"———————7">

<5’9"————4%———————-24%————————44%———————-28%———-365 votes

5’10"-6’1"——3%———————-21%————————42%———————-34%———-441 votes

6’2">————2%———————-16%————————40%———————-42%———-194 votes

Since the poll involved ranges one can only estimate the average for each height category, but nevertheless, despite the significant percentage difference in the 7"> penis size in each category, as I recall the average was only something like 1/8" difference between the height ranges (a total of 1/4" difference) which I had arrived at by assigning 4.75 to the <4.99 category, 5.5 to the next category, 6.5 to the next, and 7.25 to the 7>, which was possibly too conservative an approach but I was trying to be as fair as possible.
Here’s the poll in case you wish to review it.
Height vs. weenie

I’d disagree with that. I think the point of the article is about predicting unlikely events, not about trends. We definitely are in Mediocristan, with penis size data.

Outliers might greatly affect some measurements, like averages, but that is why statisticians routinely exclude outlying data as a technique for normalization; the resulting skews are not useful in most real world applications. Its different when an insurance company is trying to assess absolute risk, but mostly useless when trying to assess RELATIVE risk, which is what matters, because the risk is distributed amongst a pool. I might in fact be one of the very few people ever to be struck and killed by a meteorite, but my absolute overall risk of mortality remains the same as everyone else in the pool. I’m not an outlier just on the off chance that something really weird might end my life.

Now, If I were to take out meteorite strike insurance, it would be a different story.

Likewise, crop insurance is available because of the pool. Sure, only Farmer Joe’s alfalfa field MIGHT be submerged and ruined because the municipal water tank down the road collapses from metal fatigue, but its a far more likely scenario that it will be wiped out in the same flood or storm that ruins crops in the entire region.
So even if Farmer Joe’s farm was near the high elevation in the area, he’d pay the same rate for crop insurance as everyone else, despite his invulnerability to flooding, because there’s also droughts, locusts, fire, tornado, theft, etc.

I thought this was a telling quote from the article:
“Know how to rank beliefs, not according to their plausibility, but by the harm they may cause.”

Unless dick size is distributed wildly non-normally like wealth, with 80-meter outliers out there, I don’t really see the relevance of the article.

The article demonstrates one way a distribution could be skewed (and unexpectedly). I don’t think we have a case of 80 meter penises messing things up. However, I do think we have a case where certain groups of people who do have larger penises and some who have smaller penises who were not considered. I tend to also believe that the frequency of large and small penis sizes tend to occur with far greater frequency than we know. For instance, NBA players likely have very large penises that correspond to their very large body and features (i.e. very large hands, arms, legs). Their families and their families families (to add emphasis) are also perhaps above the average. The same probably applies to the large amount of college and international basketball players. An example where some may have smaller than average penis sizes likely would offend some people, so I’ll leave that out here.

My point? Frequency of “outliers” rather than magnitude could affect average values. It’s possible that what we think is small or big could be much more common than we think on a world-wide scale. We’ll never know when we keep getting these studies with very small or biased data.

Notice I didn’t say that this article applied directly to what we are talking about. It’s just one way in which what is predicted can be totally thrown off by unexpected large events (either in magnitude or frequency).

Also, Para-Goomba, your avatar greatly disturbs me.

;)

This thinking is where you’ve gone wrong. Penis size is not correlated to hand size, arm length, leg length, foot size, palm size, or almost any other individual anthropomorphic parameter, although there is a correlation, albeit not a very strong one, between height and penis size (but from what I have seen of the various data in surveys that have asked this question, even the optimistically generous online ones like DPSS, its good for about a half inch difference between guys over 6 foot 4 and guys under 5 foot 10.)

Also, what makes you so confident that the big guys are not adequately represented in surveys? If anything, they are far more likely to be over-represented, due to self-selection bias, while the small guys are more likely to be under-represented, again, due to the same bias.

Without some data or facts to support it, what basis do you have for the belief that “the frequency of large and small penis sizes tend to occur with far greater frequency than we know”? This is perplexing. You’ve cited sample sizes as your basis for skepticism in earlier posts, but there have been many studies on penis size conducted, some with thousands of subjects, and they all return approximately similar data. I find it hard to believe that all the studies and surveys consistently fail to include a significant population of very big penises, although I find it a bit easier to believe the inverse, that they fail to include the smaller penises at a higher rate.

How do you calculate frequency in population from sd? I would like to determine the frequency in population of the sixth and seventh sd.