paolo.blog
Statistical Significance, or the Karaoke Problem
When a band gets fifty thousand people singing along in a stadium, the crowd sounds surprisingly good — on pitch, on tempo. Not because concert-goers are better singers than karaoke regulars They're the same people. The difference is sample size. In a crowd of 50,000, every individual is slightly off — sharp, flat, early, late. But those errors are random. They distribute around the correct note in a bell curve.