Famously, or not, the professor in my statistical mechanics course said infinity seems to be about 100. What he meant was it’s usually safe to treat any set with more than 100 members statistically. What he didn’t add was that it becomes necessary for any set with more than 1,000 members.
The US has 330,000,000 people in it. The world is at 8 billion, give or take. Even Missoula County has more than 100,000. We became “statistical” many years ago. Understanding statistics has been critical to solving societal problems for several millennia, even if that understanding has only come recently.
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