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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I guess I'm being slow -- I get that the sample size is too small to confirm the effect, but I'm not seeing where the selection bias is.

Is it that the type of people who would be attracted to founding a startup are more likely to apply/be accepted to Olin than Stanford? That seems to confirm the original article's thesis rather than invalidate it, in my eyes, so I don't expect that's what you're thinking..

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It's possible that Olin exclusively having engineering degrees produces a bias. Stanford has a significant population who study subjects that do not aid in pursuing a career in entrepreneurship.

If you assume that, out of all the students who applied to Olin, only 70 were entrepreneur-y, then a class size of 75 would capture all of them, and Olin would have an impressive number of successful entrepreneurs among its alumni.

But it doesn't scale. If you made Olin accept ten times as many students, then its numbers would regress to the mean.

One source of bias here: there are lots of small schools, chances are high that one of them will exhibit a large number of founders due to noise, and this will be the one picked up by the report cited.

With enough tiny schools you can find outliers for anything.

Give me the stats and I'll show you why a seemingly random school is the epicenter of modern opioid addiction.

There aren't enough tiny schools to explain this result.

The p-value against this result if this school was as good as Stanford by pure chance is 1/10k. There are only 3k 4 year colleges in the USA. The vast majority of which are significantly worse than Stanford.

It is therefore extremely unlikely that pure chance alone would explain this data point.

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