this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
418 points (98.2% liked)

Science Memes

16827 readers
5194 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] DonPiano@feddit.org 3 points 3 days ago

To expand a little: you get a 95% ci by taking the expected value +-SE*1.96 . The SE you get for a normal distribution by taking the sample SD and dividing that by the sqrt of the sample size. So if you take a standard normal distribution, the SE for a sample size of 9 would be 1/3 and for a sample size of 100 it would be 1/10, etc. This is much tighter than the population distribution, but that's because youre estimating just the population mean, not anything else.

Capturing structured variance in the data then should increase the precision of your estimate of the expected value, because you're removing variance from the error term and add it into the other parts of your model (cf. the term analysis of variance).