this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Less than 20% of a total is "significant"?
Yes. For example, 60 million people in the US (less than 20% of our total population) is a significant amount of people.
The amount the percentage represents is irrelevant. A billion people could be involved, but if the total is 7 billion, it's not going to be a significant part of the total trend.
5% can be a driver if it's having a decent impact on your results. This is kind of a stats 101 thing man. You might even look for those outliers in your results and find a way to specifically exclude them if you find that the information you're getting is being skewed. Do that too hard and it's called P-hacking.
"We found that the bottom 5% of respondents were driving results negatively and so excluded the top and bottom 5%."
Think about it as a literal driver. It's a driver. It's not the driver and also half the passengers. You can drive a motorcycle, you can drive a bus, and how much of the occupancy you are of those two things can change dramatically but you're still a driver.
Obviously even 1 extreme outlier can skew things, but that's not the case here.
In the terms of your analogy, this is about 3 people out of 20 pedaling a (weirdly long) bike and steered by all of them (somehow). Would you say that group of 3 are driving? Or would you concede it's the two groups of 6 that are mostly driving the bike?
What happens when those three pedal the other direction?
It's stats, it's a descriptive term. It just literally doesn't mean what you're saying it means.
A driver in stats is just an item or a group that has a significant impact on the final result. What that means is going to vary from study to study.
Anyway, you can hold on to your belief about what a driver is, you are factually incorrect, and you were also kind of an asshole to the other guy. I'm out.
I've already agreed that situations vary. My point has always been about this study, not others. In this situation, the 15-20% of births in teens was not "the traditional driver of USA birth rates" (paraphrasing).
As for the other person, they were being an asshole for repeatedly attempting to use their own misunderstanding to delegitimize my point instead of taking even a moment to consider my words wholly. Pardon me for not having a surplus of patience to endure that today.
Your "words wholly" includes more than whatever you think it does.
Has it? I think you're far less clear and careful with your words than you think you are. You've been arguing from the start that less than half of something isn't and can't be significant. We aren't even discussing the text in this study that you can read in the screenshot:
What you're saying now about “the traditional driver of USA birth rates” isn't reflected in your other comments.
Your numbers are all over the place and don't really make sense for what you're talking about. 3 plus two groups of 6 would only be 15 out of 20, so where did the other 5 people go?
But more to the point, if those 3 stop pedaling, or pedal harder than everyone else combined, or apply the brakes, or tip the bike over, any number of other things they could absolutely change the speed/direction of the bike.
Feel free to stop responding to my discussion with someone else with your asinine "contributions". They serve no purpose but to derail the conversation with your brash lack of understanding.
Yes it is...
When it comes to teen pregnancies, 1 is 1 too many. ~20% is significant.
Yeah, that's not what I said.
Yeah. Less than 1% would be insignificant. More than 5% is significant, most times. More than 10% is definitely significant.