Lurker said:
So, after some homework, Bill what do you have to say:
1. Is the Poisson always a good approximation?
2. When is it not?
Lurker
Lurker,
You claim to be a skeptic. And yet, here you are, taking up the mantle of another "avowed skeptic" who persistently takes up the mantle of clear woos, who also claim to be skeptics.
I would dearly love to accept you, Thanz, Clancie and the rest of all of you "skeptics" into the fold, but I have some serious problems. First, with you, of course, is one of your earlier posts where you described Randi's column in Skeptical Inquirer as one of the chief motivations for your coming aboard JREF. That would be nice, except that Randi didn't write "Twis Brilling" for SI, he wrote it for Skeptic. That would be Shermer's rag. And your mistake would group you in the good company, unfortunately, of Clancie, who can't tell that Shermer isn't part of CSICOP, and that O'Neill emailed Randi, and not Shermer and not CSICOP. I dunno. Chalk that up to woo racism. All us skeptics must look alike to you white-as-the-ghosts-you-believe-in folk.
I've been around the internet (and its predecessors) for many years. Don't ask how many. I've debated with many "avowed skeptics" who were really "shills". Now I don't want quite yet to classify you as a "shill", but they clearly exist. Along with the doctor (who thought i was a bouncer) telling me all about how little we understood anaesthesia, and whom I lived to watch flame out and abandon that board as I drove evidence between her and her idiotic claims. And the "biologist" who wrote about how wrong I was for expressing disbelief over a claim that a vaccine had killed two litters of puppies and who nearly got dragged into court by both the manufacturer and the distributor she named. And the constant flood of "net experts" (they really aren't experts but they play them on the net), who either flame out or keep on going and going like deranged energizer bunnies.
I tire of it. I tire of the game. I tire of the attempt to work from within skeptical groups and undermine their efforts. This is why one of my missions is to identify such idiots, root them out and make sure they dry up, if necessary. My other mission, though, is to bring more people into the light and forestall this attempt to drag us back into the dark ages.
It is my continued, though waning, hope that you and T'ai Chi are not examples of these types of irrational, dark-age people. That is why I am giving you one more shot at this.
Re-read your source. With understanding, please. That is not a description of the conditions under which Poisson is valid. Neither is it a description of Poisson as "Binomial lite". If you have real trouble understanding this, I will help you. That is an honest offer, if you approach this honestly. Unfortunately, your approach is part of the problem for me.
Now let me give you an exercise from Hogg & Craig's
Introduction to Mathematical Statistics, third edition. It is from page 98. If you don't have a copy, just ask anyone who's been through Cherry's Stat 231 course here at _____'s exotic dance bar. She used to hold it late in the evenings, or early morning's, depending on your perspective.
"3.23 Let X have a Poisson distribution with mu=100. Use Chebyshev's inequality to determine a lower bound for Pr(75 < X < 125)."
Poisson with mu=100? What justifies that?
Wake up before you get branded a laughingstock. Last chance before heckling mode.
Lurker confused Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer. So what? I think its a very unpleasant tactic to somehow interject me (a "woo woo") into the mix and use my goof to somehow impugn someone else's credibility as a skeptic for a much less significant error--one totally unrelated to mine in any way.
