MixedNuts comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong

65 Post author: Yvain 03 November 2012 11:00PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (733)

Sort By: Popular

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: MixedNuts 04 November 2012 04:26:57PM *  5 points [-]

Intuitive answer:

Picture a horizontal line and points scattered around it. If there are many points, the line will be dark and there'll be a cloud around it. If there are few points, you'll get a vague shape and it won't be easy to tell where the line originally was.

Rigorous answer:

print [
len(filter(lambda x: x > 0.6 *per_day,
[
sum([ randint(0,1) for birth in range(0, per_day) ])
for day in range(0, 365)
]))
for per_day in (15, 45)
]

Thoughtful answer: Why would I bother thinking? Fetch me an apple.

Edit: For copulation's sake, whose kneecaps do I have to break to make Markdown leave my indentation the Christian Underworld alone, and who wrote those filthy blatant lies masquerading as comment formatting help?

Comment author: dbaupp 06 November 2012 11:31:53PM *  1 point [-]

That's not such a rigorous answer:

Imagine you have a random sample with n observations x_1, ..., x_n, independently and identically distributed according to some distribution with mean mu and variance s^2.

The sample mean is sum(x_i)/n (the expected value is mu as one would hope). Doing some manipulations we find that this has variance s^2/n, i.e. a large n means a small variance, so larger samples are more tightly clustered around mu.

Comment author: Emile 05 November 2012 09:30:04AM *  2 points [-]

whose kneecaps do I have to break to make Markdown leave my indentation the Christian Underworld alone

There may be a more convenient method, but using non-breaking spaces ( ) works.

print [
  len(filter(lambda x: x > 0.6 *per_day,
             [
               sum([ randint(0,1) for birth in range(0, per_day) ])
               for day in range(0, 365)
              ]))
  for per_day in (15, 45)
]
Comment author: [deleted] 06 November 2012 12:52:18AM 0 points [-]

Certain browsers (early versions of Firefox, at least) for some reason automatically replace all hard spaces with regular spaces when submitting a form.

Comment author: Morendil 05 November 2012 12:11:10AM 7 points [-]

For another intuitive answer, try lower values of 15, like 1.

The Python code works better, on my machine, if I add the line "from random import randint" at the top.

Comment author: FAWS 04 November 2012 05:31:47PM *  2 points [-]

Edit: For copulation's sake, whose kneecaps do I have to break to make Markdown leave my indentation the Christian Underworld alone, and who wrote those filthy blatant lies masquerading as comment formatting help?

does
prefacing with 4 extra spaces work?

EDIT: Apparently not. Very likely a bug then.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 November 2012 07:17:13PM 2 points [-]

The usual kludge is to replace spaces with full stops.