On 4/12/06, Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm just saying in terms of the likelihood of
somebody speaking
English who said they were born in "Georgia". The odds are just
statistically higher that somebody saying that, knowing nothing else
about the context in which it was said, were born in the US state than
in the Eastern European country. I of course don't mean that to be
much of a convincing argument, but it was something which occurred to
me in response to an earlier comment.
You actually just accidentally distorted the argument (originally, the
person born in Georgia wasn't necessarily an English speaker), but
it's not too important. This discussion convinces me that slight
differences in how we define the goals of this project, its biases,
how we measure masses of people, etc, can lead to significant
differences in outcome.
Imagine, for example that instead of a 60-60 on the poll, the result
had been 40-80. Or, it had been advertised on other Wikipedias (as if
it mattered that much). Or something.
Steve