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I told a guy that a wide variance in data essentially means that results were random then he proceeded to explain p values and I’m like “yeah I’m sure the random values values came from nature”.

Moral is p values kinda worth less than variance

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FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Are you saying you can’t determine a difference in aggregate statistics by performing more trials if the variance is high?

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- Cattail@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  You can the issue with A-B comparison is that is kinda expected for one group to be higher on average simple based on the data points you selected.
  
  If the averages are kinda similar and variance are high in both group A and B then I’d say both groups are statistically the same even if the statistical values are different
  
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  - FishFace@piefed.social ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    So you have two groups of ten experiments, mean if group A is 100, mean of group B is 105, variance is 25 (for both groups). Obviously we are not confident that these groups differ.
    
    Now suppose we repeat the experiment two billion times. The group A average is now 99, and the group B average is now 103. The variance is still 25. Are you still not confident that the groups are different?
    
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    Cattail@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I’d be curious what constitution a group a versus a group b and how you get 2 billion of them.
    
    But I’ll interpret it as sperm on a race track since you can get 2 billion runs with one nut.
    
    I have to say after billion trials the averages that you calculate did come from random sample, but it would be indicative average for that group since it can’t move far from that calculated average.
    
    I’m visualizing the 2 billion points of both groups and seeing a bell curve with a lot of overlap. I guess they would be different, but overall very similar since the variance is pretty wide.
    
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