First, I apologize if there’s a thread Pitting Terr already in progress. I do notice that in threads like this one, he’s already been informed that he’s stupid and imbecilic, mistakes jokes for valid opinions, and worse. So sorry if my nit-picking Pitting is too late to add value.
I won’t attempt a crash course in statistics in this post, but briefly, if you poll 620 people about their opinions and 50% answer Yes to “Do you think Terr is a moron?” but only 10% answer Yes to “Do you think Terr is an imbecile?” then the margin of error on the first question is 4%, but only 2.4% on the 2nd question. The change in error margin is pretty obvious to anyone with good statistics training, or even good mathematical intuition. For brevity, a poll will typically report just the maximal margin of error across its questions. This is summarized pretty well at Wikipedia, as quoted by me.
Now, I do understand that most people are not mathematicians. I understand that many college graduates had trouble with statistics, or didn’t study it at all. But if you don’t understand statistics you should know that you don’t understand statistics. *Don’t try to teach Grandma how to suck eggs, **especially if you don’t even have a clue what an egg is! :smack: ***
Since Terr knows nothing whatsoever about statistics, surely he must realize he knows little! Even allowing for the Dunning–Kruger effect, he might exaggerate his 3rd-grade understanding of statistics to, at most, high-school level. Yet he has the insolence to pretend he might know more than I do. :smack: Look at the stupidity with which he responded to my post:
Now I admit that we should be Pitting septimus for his perverse sensitivity to such idiocies. To get angry at the annoyances of a moron like Terr is like getting angry at a dimwitted mosquito who sucks my blood. There are probably millions of people in North America even stupider than Terr, but few with my peculiar temper and sensitivity. But I do get annoyed. And I’m no longer going to take it silently.
For me to blow my own horn would seem exaggerated or immodest, so I’ll just say my IQ is much higher than most Dopers would guess that it is. 
If I dare to offer an opinion on some trivial mathematical topic, it is quite unlikely that I’m wrong.
This run-in with Terr is not unique. A few years ago, I got frustrated in a discussion about a curious fact about gambling (using roulette as an example), arguing with a Doper who also suffered from Dunning–Kruger. But I don’t want to Pit him – he does seems like a very friendly and good-spirited man, and makes many intelligent (non-math-related) contributions. But I am happy to Pit Terr who has been consistently obnoxious and arrogant, even by stupid right-winger standards.
A difference is that I am behaving like a cantakerous child in my berating of Terr on a subject where I am factually correct and he is factually wrong. You also behave like a cantakerous child but (apparently unbeknownst to you :smack: ) I was correct in the thread where I’m berated, and you were wrong. 