Gregory's ServerThis 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*?
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28 comments
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
skyeye
@kinyutaka 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 
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. 
Emma Builds 🚀
@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 https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware. I can write this up as a blog post if folks are interested.
Irenes (many)
  
Janne Moren
@irenes @mcc 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
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 (many)
Klara Binon
Irenes (many)
Klara Binon
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
@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”
Paul Bernhardt
@mcc People that participate in studies are WEIRD https://slate.com/technology/2013/05/weird-psychology-social-science-researchers-rely-too-much-on-western-college-students.html 
🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦
@mcc #RandomPedantry
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. |
@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.