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To: GraceZ who wrote (16861)	2/6/2004 4:43:48 PM
From: fatty	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

>Your problem involved taking the top 12% of their population which was equal to the entire population of our country. The 12% is a subset of the set "entire population", in the case of Americans, the subset and the set would be exactly the same and have the same distribution, but the subset of the Indian/Chinese and you cannot assume the subset has the same characteristics as the the entire population even though it is a very large set, it doesn't. Do you understand what I meant when I said "chosen randomly" and "chosen by choice"? If we have to choose 300 million participants from the US, either randomly or by choice, the subset that's chosen is going to be same because there is only 300 million people in the US. But for Chindia, they have 2,500 million people, so if you want to choose by choice, you can hand pick the smartest 12%. So using your assumption that "good at math" follows a normal distribution across the population set, then the 300 milions smartest participant from Chindia is going to be smarter than the 300 million 'smartest' participants from the US. >But your problem does remind me of a story that shows why the "best" doesn't always win a contest. Ok, now you want to step into the occults. I give up. You win. I lose. End of thread.