Hacker News Reader

>Any statistician worth their salt can see the problem with an operational definition of height that starts with "bottom of their feet".

I don't get it, what's the problem with that?

View on HN

When field workers go out to measure people from their feet they will inevitably encounter someone who does not have feet. The ambiguity of how the definition applies to this case can easily lead to field workers doing weird things like substituting (non-randomly) people with feet for those without, or trying to guess "if this person had feet" or simply omitting that unit from the sample entirely.

Either one of those methods are fine, but leaving it unspecified is a threat to external validity.

I thought the catch was going to be people who cannot stand upright.

In theory you could have rigourous guidelines that span pages and cover as many edge cases as possible. That's besides the point of the article. Finding an edge case in a definition mentioned in passing doesn't really give you a lot of ground to criticise the statistical approach. It's just nitpicking which distracts from the overall point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com