Comment by Karellen
19 days ago
> if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish,
I don't get this. What does the proportion of blue fish have to do with the total number of fish you catch?
Is there some stats knowledge I'm missing?
It's a fumbled metaphor, mixing absolute and relative numbers, and I think it's supposed to say "pull out nine blue fish".
The point the article is making is that the "reporter" turned up and alledged to have found nine cases of daycare fraud. Nine sounds like a lot, right? But the article claims the state already knew 50% of the daycares claiming its aid were frauds (this is quite debatable, don't take it as fact). Presumably that's 50% of hundreds or maybe thousands of daycares.
If blue fish were much rarer in the pond, i.e. lower percentage of daycares defrauding the government, you'd be considered a savant for fishing once and pulling out nine blue fish... but if the pond has thousands of fish and 50% are blue, it looks a lot less impressive.
Oh yeah, "nine blue fish" would make a lot more sense there.