Cheers to Watchdog for using the phrase “not statistically meaningful”.
Usually people often use the phrase “statistically significant.” In order to be statistically significant, all you have to do is to collect enough data points.
If you were to examine 150 million adult Americans and find that people who eat at McDonald’s have fingernails 0.003″ longer than those who eat at Burger King, it would be statistically significant—and utterly meaningless. If you were to examine 30 adults, and find that 90% of all the Time readers ate at McDonald’s, and 90% of the Newsweek readers ate at Burger King, it would be statistically insignificant—but there might well be a meaningful difference if you did more sampling.
If you’re rounding off to the nearest 1/10th, and the difference shown is only 1/10, the actual numbers could be showing a shift from 9.3499 to 9.3501. Scientists always treat the last digit as questionable—and they know that mathematical manipulation can only make numbers less reliable.
