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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35038 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Aella has a response to these types of questions here. I don't know how you'd ever get population-level statistics on these types of questions without going through the task of asking every single person.

The proper response to data quality questions is to respond with better data, not throw away all conclusions totally because they're politically inconvenient (which is what a lot of political partisans like to do). The problem is that research is very thin on these types of questions, so oftentimes there's not a lot of counterdata to respond with. In such a case, some data > no data, just keep in mind the error bars are higher than they would be if this was an established survey house polling on a traditional question like "who do you want for president".

Well, for one, the statistics I've seen for divorce is that there is a very large class difference. My first result of a Google search was this that says overall only 30% of middle and upper class couples get divorced, 41% of the working class, and 46% of the poor (which also disagree with 50% overall).

Result #3 says the overall divorce rate is 44%. It also notes many professions (including SW devs) have a divorce rate around 20%.

Aella's readers are a very non-representative sample. Perhaps not quite as non-representative as the lobby of a divorce lawyer, but not too much worse, IMO, and yes, selling very skewed data as representative data is worse than NO data, IMO.

In such a case, some data > no data, just keep in mind the error bars are higher than they would be if this was an established survey house polling on a traditional question like "who do you want for president".

If it makes us draw a false conclusion then yes, it is most certainly worse than no data.

No hedging of the claim seems to be occurring, it isn't "my followers" after all, and the blatant motte and bailey here probably has pushed me out of suspicion and into hostility as it concerns Aella.

The proper response to data quality questions is to respond with better data,

No it's not. Getting better quality data will cost a lot of money. People have no obligation to spend their hard earned cash, in order to prove a TikTok poll wrong.

Why the criticism of TikTok as a sample source? I'd imagine it's actually less vulnerable to sampling bias than Twitter, being that it's stupidly-popular. Now, granted, I'd use it more as a finger on the pulse of what's popular with the younger demographics, but still.

Why the criticism of TikTok as a sample source? I'd imagine it's actually less vulnerable to sampling bias than Twitter

Damning by faint praise?

Again, it's not perfectly representative of the world or even America, but I'd sure as shit say that something like TikTok or Tumblr can be valuable as a social weathervane. After all, a lot of the social justice stuff was incubated on Tumblr, and look where we are now.

I certainly don't mean that whoever responds has to do/fund the survey themselves, just that they should cite some form of data done by someone else.

Why? What if there isn't any other data done by someone else, the data in question can still be bad and be proven wrong.

How can you prove it wrong if you don't have data?

I mean you can point out the methodology is faulty, in this case the data.

So what you would be doing is finding errors in it's reasoning, the conclusion may be true on its own, doesn't matter.

that is fair, thanks.

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