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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Selection bias is when you get misleading effects or conclusions or whatever due to how you selected the ppl you're asking about. As in, if you're measuring how nice ppl are and then ask ppl to volunteer for your study, you'll only be measuring ppl nice enough to volunteer.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
And to be clear, a lot of those studies you believe and use to shape your view of reality are drawing from pretty narrow samples anyway: college kids tryin to get good grades by participating in studies, or the classic WEIRD demographics.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
My twitter followers are obvs not a representative sample of the population, I am VIVIDLY AWARE OF THIS i am not an idiot. They tend to be male, white, 25-35yo, disproportionately libertarian (and otherwise politically split), living in mostly the US.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
And if I did something dumb like asking my twitter followers if they're into FPS video games and then using that number to extrapolate to the general population then yes your critique would be good, however unfortunately I am not in fact this dumb
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
And it's *okay* to ask selected populations about information likely to be heavily biased by the selection (like video games) as long as you interpret it in context and don't fail to consider that selection effects might have modified your results.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Things that *are* interesting and have higher chances of extrapolating are lots of types of correlations; in this case, I asked about BDSM and abusive childhoods. Maybe the correlation that showed up is due to selection bias, but how would that work?
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
yes i did also think about this
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to @sashachapin
yeah there's a lot of potential confounders like that, including ppl into bdsm are more likely to be in cultures that frame childhood experiences as abusive, but the difference is large enough that I think there's a good chance some of it is directly causal.