Reply #16: Turning east

[ThePlumber]

You are confusing chance and sampling. If you rolled a 4 sided die to choose the direction you turned (or u-turned) then you would have a 25% chance of turning east no matter your original direction of travel.

However, you are making a concious choice, just like voting. For someone to create a statistical model of your turning they could do one of two things: track every turn you have made and ever will make at that intersection or randomly choose a few of them, sample them.

Now it has been a while so I may make some errors here:

Now the first task in sampling is to choose the number of samples. The greater the sample number the less the uncertainty (margin of error). The next task is to take the samples, they have to be truely random. Failure to do so will introduce errors far outside the margin of error and possibly skew the results toward an untrue conclusion.

If taken only in the morning they likely introduce the error of you going to work and turning south toward work much more frequently. If taken only during the evening they introduce the error of you turning east much more frequently. If taken on weekends they introduce the error of you going to the bookstore to the west. I am sure you get the idea.

So a true random sample with a large sample size will create a curve likely a gaussian curve with two peaks representing going to work and coming from work that very closely approximates the entire set of your turn choices.