This shows that the correlated variance estimate should always be larger than the uncorrelated estimate (when the correlations are positive). This is due to the autocovariance terms for lags greater than 0, which are missing from Equation . When the uncorrelated variance estimate is used in the general MSER equation (Equation ), the traditional MSER equation (Equation ) is recovered. However, samples from molecular simulations are often strongly positively autocorrelated, meaning that Equation underestimates the true variance of the mean.