this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
1140 points (92.7% liked)
Funny
6801 readers
459 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're right, of course. But I think it's equally plausible that the original writer didn't really grasp the difference and mixed some things up.
Can you eli5 the stat normalization thing? I failed stats in college fyi
Let's assume Norway has 5 million people and the US has 300 million people, and they're going to have a taco eating contest.
If every American eats 1 taco, that's ~300 million tacos eaten. If every Norwegian eats 30 tacos, that's "only" 150 million tacos eaten (30 x 5mil = 150mil).
If we're talking about total tacos eaten, Norway "loses" the eating competition. But that's not really fair because the US has 60x more people participating.
If we're talking about tacos per person (aka normalizing for the population), Norway wins the competition because each person ate 30x more tacos than the average American.
So, which country eats more tacos? The answer depends if you're counting total number of tacos eaten, or average number of tacos eaten per person (aka per capita).
Thank you :)
There's two ways to count things. You can measure total consumption, or consumption per capita (per person). If the group of 100 people eats 1000 tacos, you could report it as 1000 tacos eaten, or 10 tacos eaten per capita.
The later is more useful when comparing between groups of different sizes. The US likely consumes more total tacos than Norway, just because the population is so much larger. If we adjust for the size of the population (divide the total by the population size), Norway may be higher —if we assume the OP is correct and this is what they meant.
Thanks!