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mcc

This is the "what if lab rats just get cancer a lot" joke except real

Do you have a correlation in your data? Or is one of your sample groups simply more likely to generate *statistics*?

28 comments
modulux

@mcc Sometimes I wonder if Firefox isn't heavily under-measured as a browser because it's run by privacy nerds who set up no telemetry, no js, or other forms of blocking that obscure it, for example.

phii (local floofgirl cutie)

@mcc i might be wrong about this but isn't it actually even the other way round, with rats that were bred to be cute and pet-like having a higher cancer risk than lab rats due to being over-bread?

bc when me and my relatives had rats that were bread to be kept as pets they all died rlly quickly, but then we got lab rats instead (as pets, i mean) and they lived for wayy longer

kinyutaka

@phseiff @mcc

There's still a lot of factors that have to be accounted for.

For example, the lab rats are bred and designed to be as healthy as possible, while the pet rats are bred to simply survive long enough for a child to grow bored of them.

And then fed to the pet snake.

skyeye

@kinyutaka
sprague dawley rats are used for cancer research cause they generally get cancer after like 2 or 3 years. So you can faster results on how cancerous something is if the rats get tumors within like 6 months

Fun fact: An anti GMO group used this to spread fud about gmos giving you cancer by showing off enormous tumors in sprague dawley rats. Except the rats in the study were years old
@phseiff @mcc

LN

@skyeye @kinyutaka @phseiff @mcc IIRC a lot of pet rats are descendents of lab rats and this is why they too are predisposed to growing tumors. Also the "look at all this cancer in the cancer rats" study I'm aware of was about glyphosate/Roundup: whether or not it can cause cancer, the most widely popularized study (which had photographs of grotesque tumors) was the result of keeping the rats alive well past the point they naturally develop severe tumors for shock value.

Irenes (many)

@mcc Linux users are immersed in a culture that explicitly views software as a communal effort, working towards common purpose. Maybe that idea isn't explicit for everyone, but when people are steeped in it, of course they contribute bug reports! A bug report is an attempt to help the project! It may also feel like a complaint, but the material effect of it is helpful.

Escaping Galt's Gorean Gulch

@irenes @mcc brushing the oxidation off my Bugzilla search skils confirms that Linux is responsible for disproportionately more bug reports to the size of the user base as a whole.

Windows is 85% of Firefox users on desktop, see data.firefox.com/dashboard/har.

I can write this up as a blog post if folks are interested.

Irenes (many)

@emma @mcc also can we just say that it took us a moment to realize you weren't trying to say anything about rust the programming language there :)

mcc

@irenes Or they value their time less "lol"

Janne Moren

@irenes @mcc
It's probably more simple than that. A much higher proportion of Linux users work in jobs related to software development or deployment, or have that as a hobby. That background is likely what attracted them (us) to the OS in the first place.

And so a much higher proportion know that filing bug reports is important, and a much higher proportion is familiar and comfortable with the process.

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

@jannem

The Golden Rule in action: "Well, I'd certainly hope somebody would file a bug report to let me know about an issue in *my* project!"

@irenes @mcc

Irenes (many)

@siderea @jannem @mcc that's honestly a good point. we think it's still compatible with what we said, but yeah that does deserve to be mentioned

Klara Binon

@irenes @mcc if you might be able to look at which windows users file bugs, maybe many are involved in open source as well

Irenes (many)

@Klara @mcc interesting thought. seems a little invasive to go digging that up about people, though we don't doubt it's possible these days. cool speculation though

Klara Binon

@irenes @mcc
Taking care of the commons is something we do, and it spills over to things that are technically owned but that we use together.

mcc

"A recent study performed on the University of Toronto campus with participants selected by responding to a flier offering $5 for participation, revealed that 92% of all Canadians are students at University of Toronto…"

(This is a joke; I suspect sociologists have some way of correcting for this already)

(EDIT: Note I am not saying I believe the way sociologists have of correcting for it *works*.)

Jason Petersen (he)

@mcc uh IIRC this is a “joke but not really” in psychology and social sciences.

The joke is “add ‘among mostly 18–22yos with the social status to be in college’ to every psychology paper”

keithzg
@mcc The important thing is to try a number of different "corrections" until you find it creates a statistically significant result you can publish
Sven :8bit_mario2:

@mcc 98% of people say that they enjoy responding to surveys. 😉

red0ran

@mcc yeah, quota sampling and population weights. Standard for pretty much anything where generalizable findings are the aim.

🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦

@mcc #RandomPedantry
Lab rats in fact DO get cancer more than normal. There are tightly-inbred strains of mouse and rat bred for higher cancer susceptibility. For exactly the reason the Linux users are valued...

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

@mcc This is a huge, huge, huge problem in personality science. If you want to get any sort of demographic information, about the distribution of traits through a population, you can't actually do it through voluntary testing, because the selection indexes of so many interesting things on "who is voluntarily willing to take a personality test" are kind of astronomical.

Andy Wootton

@mcc It also seems related to the famous case of the analytical error of deciding where WW2 aircraft needed better armour, based on statistics about the location of holes in returning planes. Windows users learn to expect to be shot down because they have no say in what gets armoured.

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