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Not the person you replied to, but I am concerned that Aella doesn't care much about representativeness of the sample, instead prefering to boast about how many people filled in the survey (over 500,000 now!)
Aella claims that large sample sizes are helpful to extract statistically significant data on rare subgroups, but the Lizardman Constant shows that's not true. For example, if only 1 in 1000 people are Freemasons, you can't collect good data on Freemasons by sampling even 1,000,000 people, because according to the Lizardman Constant of 4%, you would get 40,000 responses from people falsely claiming to be Freemasons drowning out the results from the 1,000 real ones. Aella seems oblivious to this.
There are other obvious reasons why the results to Aella's kink survey would be biased, e.g.:
People who aren't kinky are going to be less inclined to take a survey on kink, and it's not obvious how to control for that.
Normal people with a fulltime job and a family and/or a social life don't spend a lot of time filling out surveys on TikTok. So the results are likely going to be biased towards terminally online weirdos, and it's not obvious how to control for that.
This isn't just conjecture; it's obvious in the results she's reported so far are not representative at all. For example, in The mental illness gap between cis and not-cis females she reports that trans-identified females are almost 5 times more likely to suffer from autism than normal females. Seemed interesting, and definitely plausible. But then I noticed that about 50% of all female respondents claimed to suffer from clinical depression, while more than 20% identified as transgender. Both of these figures are waaaay above the base rates in the overall population, even in the US, even if you account for the fact that females and young people are more likely to id as trans.
So either the sample is extremely biased, or people are lying about a lot of stuff, or both: either way, this doesn't bode well for the validity of other results.
My concern is not so much this bias itself. Lots of academic research is biased, as Aella pointed out on the stream (also known as the WEIRD bias). My concern is that Aella is not really willing or able to acknowledge the limitations of her own research. For example, on the stream she claimed that 93% of women consumed erotica. Only when Murphy challenged her did she admit this was 93% of respondents: but as I pointed out these are going to be biased towards more kinky people.
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