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foo101 | 6 years ago

If you present a weird distribution to begin with, it should not be surprising that every digit does not have the same chance of appearing. That's not the point. We are not talking about weird distributions here.

If we are going to argue like this, I might as well present a set of two numbers S = {1, 2} and claim that when we choose numbers from uniform distribution, the probability of 3 occurring as the first digit is 0. Other commenters are not assuming weird distributions like this because this kind of discussion does not provide any new insights and is just a waste of time.

discuss

order

EGreg|6 years ago

You can create all the strawmen you want. I am going to quote from Wikipedia:

The law states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading significant digit is likely to be small.

I have explained why that happens for the vast majority of UNIFORMLY DISTRIBUTED VARIABLES.

The vast majority. That implies that there is a collection of all possible uniformly distributed variables, and in particular those that are sampled from real world processes.

As long as they are uniformly distributed, with 0 as the minimum and M as the maximum, the first digit will appear more commonly.

I explained it several times. Why are you still insisting that statements about MAJORITY of uniform distributions are weird?

Yes statements about collections of uniform distributions are not statements about ONE SPECIFIC uniform distribution. And?

foo101|6 years ago

Can you provide an example range of uniformly distributed integers that obeys Benford's law?