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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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I don't think there's really much evidence for this one though. I haven't seen anything convincing demonstrating that such a correlation exists and is particularly significant. Especially when considering that obesity is correlated with R voting.

If someone found a collection of 100 feminist activists and journalists, and 90% of them look like Roxane Gay (who is, as polite as can be on the topic, not within the standard deviation of our culture's beauty standards), would you consider that perhaps the correlation is real, or would you say it was obviously a biased sampling?

Well one would need to parse out correlation and causation here, but yeah if there were a well-designed study that looked at this and found that, yes, feminist activists were considerably more likely to be obese then that would at least be a strong piece of evidence pointing in that direction.

Now, I think it's mostly a set of biases that cause people to think feminist activists and journalists are unusually unattractive; they're likely, as with almost every group not explicitly selected for attractiveness, going to average out to average

Yep, I think this is basically true. Most people look unremarkable so you don't remember them, but the strikingly obese ones will stick in the mind.

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