I was having a conversation with my best friend and they said that the average height is a subject thing bc in order for it to be objective they need to have study or gotten all the heights from every man in American. I’m not certain how data or stats work. But maybe it’s objective only by those who have been tested on average? Idk how to explain it to them or if I’m wrong help me understand a bit better.
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In the world of statistics, we can use relatively small sample sizes to make fairly precise predictions.
All of this is objective. We have done empirical studies, empirical meaning based on data and numbers. These studies have shown that once you get around 30 or 40 data points, you can show trends and averages and have them be very close to the real trends and averages.
I think what you want to discuss with your friend is called precision. How precise is the average? This means how close is the prediction to reality, given that the sample doesn’t include all men. Precision is about how close to correct it is. There’s also something called Margin of Error which is a measure of how far away the true answer might be from the prediction.
So what does this mean for average height in America? Well, there are massive sample sizes! This means the average is going to be very precise and the margin of error will be very low. This website below mentions that the sample size was over 47,000 people. Remember, you only need about 30 or 40 to start seeing trends and averages fairly close to the true ones. This sample size is 1000 times as large as that. I’d say you can trust the results here.
https://www.healthline.com/health/average-height-for-men#u-s-height
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