News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Measurement of the W boson mass reveals 7σ deviation from calculations. Parent comment

Re:Measurement of the W boson mass reveals 7σ deviation from... by freemint on Friday April 08, 2022 @08:26AM (#30956028)
Because it's a non-linear world? And the graphs seem very obviously skewed? And it's kurtosis also seems to differ from three?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Measurement of the W boson mass reveals 7σ deviation from... by rich_sasha on Friday April 08, 2022 @10:33AM (#30957307)
None of those things matter to the central limit theorem.

If I have IID observations with finite 2nd moment (variance), then their average will pretty quickly converge to a Gaussian distribution. And I can relax a lot of this and still recover a variant of CLT.

Of course maybe the calculation is different, eg it’s not like there are N independent observations, but rather some other complex condition solved for the mean estimate.

[ Parent | on HN ]