mamooth
Diamond Member
ATHEIST / USPS Discrimination Against Atheism?
You have a German shoe company selling Atheist-brand shoes. Yes, kind of silly, but that's not the topic. Company was getting a lot of complaints from the USA about packages not arriving. So they ran an experiment.
89 pairs of packages were sent to addresses all over the USA. Each pair was mailed at the same time to the same address, and were identical except that one package used plain packing tape, and one package used packing tape that said "ATHEIST" (the brand name). The same experiment was also done in europe. It's a statistician's dream experiment, being the controls are so perfect.
In the USA, 1/89 plain packages are lost, while 10/89 "ATHEIST" packages are lost. In terms of statistics, there's a 99+% chance that's not due to random chance. In europe, there's no difference in delivery rates, so it's a USA-only problem.
Some possible explanations:
1. Everyone in the USA assumes atheist merchandise is of superb quality, and therefore they want to steal the merchandise.
2. Atheist packing tape confuses the post office sorting machines.
3. US Customs thinks that atheist packages have bombs inside.
4. Post office employees are deliberately trashing atheist packages.
All the company concluded was that they would no longer use "ATHEIST" packing tape on packages sent to the USA.
The packages were untracked, and needed to be for such a study. Tracking would have altered the study, since someone is less likely to tamper with a package if they know it's being tracked.
You have a German shoe company selling Atheist-brand shoes. Yes, kind of silly, but that's not the topic. Company was getting a lot of complaints from the USA about packages not arriving. So they ran an experiment.
89 pairs of packages were sent to addresses all over the USA. Each pair was mailed at the same time to the same address, and were identical except that one package used plain packing tape, and one package used packing tape that said "ATHEIST" (the brand name). The same experiment was also done in europe. It's a statistician's dream experiment, being the controls are so perfect.
In the USA, 1/89 plain packages are lost, while 10/89 "ATHEIST" packages are lost. In terms of statistics, there's a 99+% chance that's not due to random chance. In europe, there's no difference in delivery rates, so it's a USA-only problem.
Some possible explanations:
1. Everyone in the USA assumes atheist merchandise is of superb quality, and therefore they want to steal the merchandise.
2. Atheist packing tape confuses the post office sorting machines.
3. US Customs thinks that atheist packages have bombs inside.
4. Post office employees are deliberately trashing atheist packages.
All the company concluded was that they would no longer use "ATHEIST" packing tape on packages sent to the USA.
The packages were untracked, and needed to be for such a study. Tracking would have altered the study, since someone is less likely to tamper with a package if they know it's being tracked.
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