I would have had to, somehow, disproportionately selected for not just people into BDSM, but for ppl into BDSM who were abused. My twitter must have some way of being that sort of dissuades non-abused BDSM people from following me (and *doesn't* dissuade non-abused non-BDSM ppl)
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So we have two possible realities here - either I'm somehow having a strange selection effect that's very precise and cuts across two separate questions (bdsm and abuse), *or* there's an actual effect that correlates BDSM and childhood abuse. Of the two, the latter is less absurd
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But this is the thing that bothers me - people don't realize that proposing a selection bias is proposing another theory for the results, and that depending on the type of question asked, this theory they're proposing is often extremely unlikely.
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It's like ppl just register that I'm asking through twitter, know that my twitter account doesn't have a good sampling of the population, and then assume this means that selection bias is a good theory for any sort of twitter poll finding. No! This isn't how it works!
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And I'm NOT saying that my childhood abuse/bdsm poll is conclusive, there's a lot of possible explanations for it and I'd want to replicate this in a better, more careful and detailed survey to check on other causes. But yelling 'selection bias' just makes me wanna punch you
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the way it's delivered to me is often a bad, lazy critique that doesnt understand how bias works or how it impacts things we check for. If you tell me *how* it might be selection bias then im happy to engage: what is your theory for the selection pressures on my respondents?
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If you're like 'hey aella, i think this might be mostly just due to selection bias because you have a high following in this one BDSM recovery from childhood abuse forum that you didn't know about", I'd be like whoah, that's a great point I had no idea
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Yes, true! I also often test this explicitly by asking questions together, and then also separate (at different times) to see if total % clusters are different.
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Yes, but not as big as were in this poll.
Also, if I had to predict this effect (identify effect, should we call it?) affecting the poll, I would have predicted it went the other way; BDSM ppl often don't like it being viewed as related to abusive childhoods