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

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

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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.