The Reebok effect

In this case I don't really think that two of the three fasted is better then three of the five fasted. The bigger the group of running the less likely it is that the effect is random.

This implies that advertisers would be better off if they occasionally violated such assumptions (such as saying "of the top five" when they were in the top four) enough that it weakens the inferences viewers can make, by enough to benefit the advertisers.

Of course, the coordination problem in doing this is hard, but there are several ways around it (and not all of them just involve advertisers directly colluding with each other).

Maybe this is a better tool for structuring the discourse then it is for firmly deriving the basis of a given statement.

I'm thinking about the reports my kid gives about his football games. If the final count was 10:9 and the game was long, I ask if it were the final goal which took so much time to score; not because I expect it to be exactly so, but rather because this is the streetlight under which I start looking for the keys.

If, OTOH, it ended at 5:3, I ask what he remembers as the most interesting points. And if it ended at 9:1...

After having read 3 sentences, I already find myself disagreeing with this analysis. "X out of 4" is nowhere near as common as "X out of 5", since humans like nice round numbers, and culturally we consider 5 to be a round number- so even if #5 was not one of the "3 out of 5" who wore the shoes, "3 out of 5" is still the appropriate phrasing to use.

Similarly, "2 out of 3" isn't as compelling, because it doesn't tell us that a large number of talented athletes are wearing the shoes, to the same extent as "3 out of 5"

So this analysis is attempting to extract far more information than is actually justified

Huh I think the linkpost didn't fully work