In this classic column from today’s e-mail, I found this unintentionally amusing statement:
The square root of one percent?
So, in other words, ten percent, right? :rolleyes:
I hope the grasp of statistics shown by this ‘researcher’ in his paper is better than his grasp of the arithmetic of fractions. Oh, wait, no I don’t.
I really hate to defend the idiots at MIU. Really. My sister-in-law and her husband believed in TM, which is fine, but also bought into the idiocy that advanced TM practitioners could levitate. Remember that bit of lunacy? Caused some problems when my eyes rolled right out of my head, sambaed down the street, and did cartwheels on the steps of City Hall.
Even so, you’re reading that statement wrong and I have to say so. David Orme-Johnson gave a perfectly acceptable expression.
Take the population of the U.S. as 300,000,000. One percent of that is 3,000,000. He’s saying that if the square root of that number, or 1732 people, practices TM-Sidhi Yogic Flying together, magic things will happen.
Magic things won’t happen. But the square root of 1% of a population is a real number and can be uniquely calculated for every population.
So that’s square-root-of-one-percent and square-root-of-one-percent-of-the-popuation, but what about square-root-of-one percent?
I’ve read this and read this, and my only response is:
Huh?
How is “square-root-of-one-percent” different from “square-root-of-one percent”? You really think that missing hyphen makes a difference?
And if it does, what?
Too much turkey, John?
John has it right. There are three different interpretations of that statement, yielding:
All three of them provide a numeric value in a completely nonsense context, so it really doesn’t matter which one you pick.
No, this is just silly. If the joke was that John was parsing the square root of one as one and then applying it to percent, then I missed the joke.
But it’s still true that nobody could possibly read the sentence that way. Even if you wanted to ridicule the speaker, you can’t make the sentence read that way.
What Orne-Johnson wants to believe is nuts, but the way he said it is perfectly straightforward English.
Definitely not straightforward English. The first time I read it, I parsed it as the [square root of one] percent, meaning one percent. When I thought about how silly that was, I mentally reparsed as the square root of [one percent], as SCSimmons did in the OP.
Your interpretation in post #2 would never have occurred to me if you haven’t said it, and I can’t imagine that it’s what he actually meant.
Given that “population” refers to an actual number (rather than the actual people themselves), then “one percent of the population” is a well-defined number.
Then,
the square root of (one percent of the population)
makes sense.
This goes back to an old bete noir of mine. Stop treating “percent” as an absolute; it is merely a measurement of proportion.
“Percent” or “per cent” means specifically “per one hundred”.
Means: “…the quality of life in society significantly improves when as little as the square root of one per one hundred of a population practices TM-Sidhi Yogic Flying…”.
The quoted statement makes total sense (though perhaps the flying and quality of life part requires a little more investigation).
Seems to me the ridiculous part is in Orme-Johnson’s apparent belief that it was somehow meaningful to express the number - whatever number it was that he meant - in that way. How does invoking square roots do anything for his credibility?
The “Happy Natural We’re Completely Crazy Loo-la Wibble Rainbow Law Party” or whatever they were called when they sat for an election in the UK 1997 had apparently commissioned an independent study that measured crime rates etc. in an area in which they had been doing yogic flying. The crime rate and/or something else experienced a minor fall/rise during their study.
I’m sure the figures did genuinely correlate, but they didn’t measure the myriad other factors affecting that area, come up with a clear definition of “area”, or measure the same criteria in similar areas in which they hadn’t been flying around.
Sure, but statisticians and public figures do not customarily express such figures in square roots, as far as I’m aware, or at least not when speaking to the media. So why did this guy? Was there some kind of Mystic Woo-La Wibble significance associated with square rootifying? :dubious:
That’s one of the things they were touting: that only a teensy proportion of the population has to chant “wibble wobble my fat fobble” and fly around on their knees or whatever it is they do, and the standard of living will go up. I’m sure in the microscopic survey they did, the square root of one-in-a-hundred of the total population of the arbitrarily ascribed “area” vaguely matches (with something of an error bar) the number of “Bibble Dibble Dobble” practitioners engaged in the habit.
Yes, I understand that he was trying to brag about a small number of wibbly practitioners affecting the general population. I’m trying to say that the way he *expressed *that small number (whatever it was) is extra-silly and made him sound like a fool who doesn’t understand numbers very well, without even getting into the relative validity of the study.
Not to defend his methodology, but there is an explanation for the “square rootification”, albeit probably a weak one. Reporting the number as a simple percentage of the population gives a linear effect, while the square root gives a non-linear effect.
Let’s pretend he actually studied different populations to determine this number. As noted, with a population of 300 million, the square root of 1% of this is 1732, or 0.00058%. In a population of 1 million, the square root of 1% is 100, or 0.01%. A population of 500 million gives 2236, or 0.00045%. The larger the population, the smaller number of flying people proportionally are needed to make the rest of us happy.
That said, someone with better math skills that I (or David Orme-Johnson) could probably come up with a better way to express it. I note if you plot these on a graph with logarithmic X and Y axes, it does result in a straight line.
They had your vote, right? 
All I know is, yogic flying was reputedly widespread in Iraq in Saddam Hussein’s last days in power, and it stopped after the U.S.-led invasion. Now look at the place. Just sayin’…
Ohhh! You’re right! I missed that interpretation entirely.
Still, it does take a special kind of statistician to look at 31 results and observe that what they have in common is the square root of one percent of each study’s population. Just sayin’.
So, if we could all just get along and think of ourselves as the united population of the Big Blue Marble, we’d only need to teach 8125 or so wibblers to fly!
Yeah, I read it is (the square root of 10%) of the population. But it’s evidently intended as the square root of (10% of the population).
They’re still morons. 
Back when I was young and green and suckered into TM (which lasted all of about three weeks 
but left me £155 poorer :smack: ) I too came across the ‘square root of one percent’ phrase and at first though it was a nonsensical rewrite of ‘ten percent’. Then I figured it out like wot Exapno did.
Now, I’m not sure I agree with jjimm’s perception of ‘percent’.
My understanding is, ‘percent’ means ‘divided by 100’. Which only makes sense when you put a number before it. So you can say ‘six percent’ which means 6/100 or 0.06. Which IS an absolute value.
Of course you can then say ‘six percent of 528’. The ‘of’ acts as a multiplier… ‘of’ really means ‘multiply’, the same as when we say ‘half of a thousand’. In the phrase ‘a half of a thousand’, the ‘half’ is a proportion, but that doesn’t mean that ‘half’ isn’t a perfectly good number all by itself. It’s 0.5. Similarly one percent is a perfectly good number, 0.01. So a percentage can be a number or a proportion. So there’s nothing loony about misreading ‘the square root of one percent’ as ‘the square root of 0.01’ which is 0.1 which is ten percent. True, the phrase ‘the square root of’ in this case applies to the whole phrase following - ‘one percent OF THE POPULATION’ - but it’s ambiguous.
Quite apart from all that, and quite apart from the lunacy of TM in general, here’s a puzzle for Dr. Orme “Om”-Johnson. Suppose a bunch of meditators set up camp in West Bumfuck, pop. 50,000. How many meditators do you need, for WB to become a paradise on Earth? Well, maybe it’s got 50,000 people in it. Or maybe, it’s got two lots of 25,000 people in it. Or 5 lots of 10,000 people in it. All of which will give different figures for the Critical-Om Point.