Frankbough - you didn't answer my counter arguments because YOU got proven wrong.
You made the incorrect assumption that a small proportion of people are 'better educated' - when actually it will ALWAYS be 50% - because 'better' is always relative. For your argument to be true, there would have to be 50 million people who were 'better educated' - and if you took any two people in the remaining 200 million, you couldn't tell them apart, education wise. That's not the case:
Take 10 people with the following IQ's:
10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 155, 155
Now, what YOU are saying is, 'Smart = 155', therefore there are only 2 'smart' people. If 50% of 'smart' people (with this definition) like to eat beef, and 25% of 'not smart' people like Beef, you would have a collective 2 people who are 'not smart' who like beef, and 1 person who is 'smart' and likes beef.
Thus, you reach your conclusion that if you take someone who likes beef, they are not more likely to be 'smart' - (33% chance - 1 out of 3) even though the smart people like beef more.
Here is why your example is wrong:
1 - You fail to address the opposite side of the comparison, in which you take someone who doesn't like beef. The chances of THEM being smart is 14.3% (1 out of 7). Thus, even in your own example, and by your own definition of 'smart' - you are still more likely to find a smart person by selecting one who likes beef, than one who doesn't. All your example proves is that you are unlikely to find a 'smart' person in either scenario. Which is meaningless. This is your main logical failing. (Did you seriously say 'school boy' to me?) Tut.
Apply this to your own numbers from your original beef criticism:
You said 50 million are 'better educated' and 250 million aren't.
You said 80% of the 'better educated' eat a lot of beef, and only 20% of the 'worse educated' eat a lot of beef.
This gives you 40 million who like beef and are smart, and 50 million who like beef and are not smart.
You therefore conclude that, if you take someone who eats beef, the chances of them being smart are 44% (40/90). You assert that this is less than 50% and believe this constitutes a valid argument
However, what you failed to do, was to work out the odds in the opposite scenario. Out of 210 million people who do NOT like beef, 10 million are 'better educated', and 200 million are 'worse educated'. This, if you select a person at random who doesn't like beef, the chances of them being smart are 4.8% (10/210). I don't think I need to explain to you how 4.8% is less than 44%
Thus, even in your own example, with your own numbers, people who eat beef, are, on average, better educated than those who don't. Similarly, if you take someone who eats beef, they are more likely to be better educated than someone who doesn't. Exactly as I stated.
2 - 'better educated' and 'smart' are both relative. So, in this scenario, if we compared the IQ of the person who is 40 with the person who is 10, the 40 person would appear smart (or 'better educated'). Given that for more cases than not, the 40 person would be regarded as the 'smarter' of the two - they can arguably claim to be 'smart'. This will always lead to the 50% of people in any relative measure.
3 - The 40 IQ can certainly claim to be smarter than the 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 and 35. Yet your example disregards this, grouping the 40 in the 'not smart' group. So in your example, even if the 2 people of the 8 who are 'not smart' who liked beef were the 40 and 45, you would still claim that beef has no correlation to intelligence, despite it being liked by 3 of the 4 people who are the most intelligent, and none of the 6 people who were the least intelligent. In other words, your artificial grouping distorts reality.
I haven't changed any of my claims, at all - please feel free to read over and check. Right now I'm just adding more words to my previous post which first disproved your 'beef' hypothesis - because obviously you didn't get it the first time.
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