There’s no way that the 1979 data was fabricated to fit the 1995 percentages, is there?
No, I’m quite confident the 1979 document is genuine (call it 100% minus a hair). Just what the data represents is something else again—by the authors’ own admission they worked with a biased sample.
The 1995 sample, assuming it is genuine, is quite unbiased—since it is (claimed to be) the entire population.
I’m also not sure what your alternate hypotheses are.
To me it seems quite likely that the 1995 “results” are artifactual: my main theory is that someone heard an oral presentation from the person cited as the author, conflated that presentation in their mind with the 1979 data, and a few years later presented a chimera of the two, attributing it to the speaker. Later authors just copied and pasted the claim and reference, neglecting to fact-check it.
the probabilities you’re trying to calculate for it aren’t correct
I’m willing to accept that. But if we agree that the close fit is suspicious, then I would hazard that we have some mathematical background for that intuition, and if so there must be at least some way of formalizing that intuition which is better than saying “I just don’t know”.
Conversely, if that intuition is in fact ungrounded (perhaps for the same reason we call “too improbable to be a coincidence” a winning lottery draw which pattern-matches something significant to us, like a birth date), there should be a way of formalizing that.
No, I’m quite confident the 1979 document is genuine (call it 100% minus a hair). Just what the data represents is something else again—by the authors’ own admission they worked with a biased sample.
The 1995 sample, assuming it is genuine, is quite unbiased—since it is (claimed to be) the entire population.
To me it seems quite likely that the 1995 “results” are artifactual: my main theory is that someone heard an oral presentation from the person cited as the author, conflated that presentation in their mind with the 1979 data, and a few years later presented a chimera of the two, attributing it to the speaker. Later authors just copied and pasted the claim and reference, neglecting to fact-check it.
I’m willing to accept that. But if we agree that the close fit is suspicious, then I would hazard that we have some mathematical background for that intuition, and if so there must be at least some way of formalizing that intuition which is better than saying “I just don’t know”.
Conversely, if that intuition is in fact ungrounded (perhaps for the same reason we call “too improbable to be a coincidence” a winning lottery draw which pattern-matches something significant to us, like a birth date), there should be a way of formalizing that.