 An alternative estimate could be found by multiplying the proportion of men who are over 6 feet in height with the proportion of men who prefer strawberry jam to raspberry jam, but this estimate relies on the assumption that the two conditions are statistically independent.A disadvantage in using empirical probabilities arises in estimating probabilities which are either very close to zero, or very close to one.In these cases very large sample sizes would be needed in order to estimate such probabilities to a good standard of relative accuracy.