#sources of bias

[9ofspades]

Personally I just interpret polls in absolutes rather than as a representative sample for this very reason. Like, I’ve no idea if it’s actually 31.6% of people on tumblr who were born before 1990 (probably not), but I know at least 41,000 people clicked that option on the poll. Assuming all of them clicked correctly (admittedly a pretty big assumption), then there are at least 41,000 people aged 33 or older who used their tumblr account in the last week.

That said, of course lies, bots, and mistakes can play a role. I guess the only actual factual piece of information that’s safe to conclude from this poll is that because those things can’t account for 41k+ votes (since they usually occur in small numbers), there are a nonzero number of people born before 1990 who used tumblr in the last week.

Also a nonzero number of people born after 2000. Everything else could’ve been glitches. I could be a glitch.

I’m curious about how an actually representative sample could be achieved, though. I don’t think there’s any way to do it that wouldn’t be horribly detrimental to tumblr as a company or the user experience, but I’m thinking the way to do it would be to do the Blaze thing, where a poll: goes out to a random 2000 users, cannot be reblogged, and must be answered before the user can continue scrolling their dashboard.

This would still exclude

Users who stopped using tumblr but left their blogs active

users who are so stubborn that they would create a new blog and nuke their old one rather than answer a poll

users who are so stubborn that they would give up tumblr entirely and move to a forest to become lumberjacks rather than answer a poll

This might still include

Accidental false clicks

Deliberate lies by users

Sending a poll to two accounts owned by the same person with multiple email addresses

Bots with accounts who are advanced enough to answer polls

The only way to avoid all of these would be to Looney Tunes IRS agent the 2000 random users by going to their house based on IP address, strapping them in an impossibly accurate lie detector, and holding them hostage until they answered the question. Also generating a replacement user for each user that turned out to be a bot, a repeat, or a deceased user.

For now, I think it’s just barely safe to draw conclusions from tumblr polls along the lines of “the number of users born before 1990 is somewhere between 0 and 41,739, non-inclusive”.

Let's consider the sampling bias of a classic polling method: the telephone survey.

In many jurisdictions, robo-calling cell phone numbers is illegal, so right off the jump, our sample is limited to people with landlines.

Second, our survey's calling centre probably doesn't operate 24/7, and you can only answer a home landline when you're at home, so we're also selecting for people who tend to be at home during our calling centre's office hours.

Third, most people who have landlines probably also have answering services and caller ID, so we're additionally selecting for people who answer unknown numbers rather than letting them go to the machine.

Fourth, our recipient needs to be able to participate in the survey, so we're also selecting for people who speak the language(s) in which the survey is being administered.

Finally, after all this, most people will just hang up once they figure out they're being polled, so in sum, we're selecting for people who:

have landlines;

are usually at home during our calling centre's office hours;

customarily answer unknown numbers;

speak the language(s) in which the survey is administered; and

are actually interested in responding to surveys.

Any one of these factors is likely to introduce very serious bias into our results; all of them taken together are going to render our data practically meaningless for most purposes.

Now, understand that this still represents less selection bias than trying to do demographic surveys by reblogging Tumblr polls.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Schools, houses of worship, hospitals, and other "sensitive locations" are no longer federally protected from ICE raids and arrests. Many school districts and religious organizations are creating plans to protect immigrants and find ways to keep ICE out (namely through officially making their buildings private and therefore requiring warrants to enter), and I strongly recommend looking into local efforts and supporting them when possible, but a lot of the information about ICE that was true a week ago no longer is. Be aware, be prepared, and know your rights.

[more information]

[ACLU'S Know Your Rights page for immigrants, available in other languages.]

[Red cards for immigrant rights to print for free or purchase large amounts and share, available in other languages.]

[en-lov3r]

HIS CUTE LITTLE DANCE MOVES

[minhanniecoupsie]

[hyunsuksswife]

[flippetyfloppity]

today in fandom lore my friend told me that makes me feel so, so tired: DS9 once ended up on a list of “fandoms that only have the one white mlm ship”

[elumish]

I mean this with all the respect in the world: you need to start looking things up before you talk about them.

Look up what words mean. Read up about ideas. Go on Wikipedia. Look at open source academic journals. Read the news.

Otherwise, you become the person spreading misinformation or malinformation.

[fatliberation]

I totally understand and can empathize with fat activists when it comes to medical fatphobia. But I do think its important to provide nuance to this topic.

A lot of doctors mention weight loss, particularly for elective surgeries, because it makes the recovery process easier (Particularly with keeping sutures in place) and anesthetic safer.

I feel like its still important to mention those things when advocating for fat folks. Safety is important.

What you're talking about is actually a different topic altogether - the previous ask was not about preparing for surgery, it was about dieting being the only treatment option for anon's chronic pain, which was exacerbating their ed symptoms. Diets have been proven over and over again to be unsustainable (and are the leading predictor of eating disorders). So yeah, I felt that it was an inappropriate prescription informed more by bias than actual data.

(And side note: This study on chronic pain and obesity concluded that weight change was not associated with changes of pain intensity.)

If you want to discuss the risk factor for surgery, sure, I think that's an important thing to know - however, most fat people already know this and are informed by their doctors and surgeons of what the risks are beforehand, so I'm not really concerned about people being uninformed about it.

I'm a fat liberation activist, and what I'm concerned about is bias. I'm concerned that there are so many BMI cutoffs in essential surgeries for fat patients, when weight loss is hardly feasible, that creates a barrier to care that disproportionately affects marginalized people with intersecting identities.

It's also important to know that we have very little data around the outcomes of surgery for fat folks that isn't bariatric weight loss surgery.

A new systematic review by researchers in Sydney, Australia, published in the journal Clinical Obesity, suggests that weight loss diets before elective surgery are ineffective in reducing postoperative complications.

CADTH Health Technology Review Body Mass Index as a Measure of Obesity and Cut-Off for Surgical Eligibility made a similar conclusion:

Most studies either found discrepancies between BMI and other measurements or concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support BMI cut-offs for surgical eligibility. The sources explicitly reporting ethical issues related to the use of BMI as a measure of obesity or cut-off for surgical eligibility described concerns around stigma, bias (particularly for racialized peoples), and the potential to create or exacerbate disparities in health care access.

Nicholas Giori MD, PhD Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Stanford University, a respected leader in TKA and THA shared his thoughts in Elective Surgery in Adult Patients with Excess Weight: Can Preoperative Dietary Interventions Improve Surgical Outcomes? A Systematic Review:

“Obesity is not reversible for most patients. Outpatient weight reduction programs average only 8% body weight loss [1, 10, 29]. Eight percent of patients denied surgery for high BMI eventually reach the BMI cutoff and have total joint arthroplasty [28]. Without a reliable pathway for weight loss, we shouldn’t categorically withhold an operation that improves pain and function for patients in all BMI classes [3, 14, 16] to avoid a risk that is comparable to other risks we routinely accept.

It is not clear that weight reduction prior to surgery reduces risk. Most studies on this topic involve dramatic weight loss from bariatric surgery and have had mixed results [13, 19, 21, 22, 24, 27]. Moderate non-surgical weight loss has thus-far not been shown to affect risk [12]. Though hard BMI cutoffs are well-intended, currently-used BMI cutoffs nearly have the effect of arbitrarily rationing care without medical justification. This is because BMI does not strongly predict complications. It is troubling that the effects are actually not arbitrary, but disproportionately affect minorities, women and patients in low socioeconomic classes. I believe that the decision to proceed with surgery should be based on traditional shared-decision making between the patient and surgeon. Different patients and different surgeons have different tolerances to risk and reward. Giving patients and surgeons freedom to determine the balance that is right for them is, in my opinion, the right way to proceed.”

I agree with Dr. Giori on this. And I absolutely do not judge anyone who chooses to lose weight prior to a surgery. It's upsetting that it is the only option right now for things like safe anesthesia. Unfortunately, patients with a history of disordered eating (which is a significant percentage of fat people!) are left out of the conversation. There is certainly risk involved in either option and it sucks. I am always open to nuanced discussion, and the one thing I remain firm in is that weight loss is not the answer long-term. We should be looking for other solutions in treating fat patients and studying how to make surgery safer. A lot of this could be solved with more comprehensive training and new medical developments instead of continuously trying to make fat people less fat.

[cazort]

I want to share a site that I think would make the world a much better place if people used it regularly.

Do you ever see a piece of news, and it's in a source you're unfamiliar with? And you're not sure if you can trust it? Is someone close to you slipping into conspiracy theories and propaganda and you want to draw them out of it, or at least protect others from falling into it too?

This site is a great place to look up news sources:

It was founded in 2015 by Dave Van Zandt and is funded through a mix of donations, advertising, and subscriptions, but the core content of the site is freely viewable by all. The site refuses donations from corporations or other organizations, and has only received small donations ($500 or less).

You can type any news source into it's on-site search. Alternatively you can just use a general web search and add "media bias fact check" on the end and often its page will come up.

What does it have?

A spectrum for political bias (Left, Left-Center, Unbiased, Right-Center, Right, and some sites going off the extremes on either end)

A separate category for Factual Reporting

History and Ownership, including location, of each outlet

A category for press freedom rating in the country in question, i.e. how suppression of the free press could bias the outlet

A brief article of analysis, justifying or explaining the category ratings

Lists of failed fact-checks (if any)

Separate categories for Conspiracy and Pseudoscience

I have found this site to be the single most useful site for looking up the quality and bias of other sources, especially news sources. Check it especially when you see a new source you're unfamiliar with, and share it with others who are unaware of it.

A lot of bad ideas propagate in society through biased media, or propaganda through conspiracy or fake news sites. This site can be a powerful tool to combat the spread of untruths, and also to steer people towards the better publications and sources out there.

[gunkbaby]

tumblr users ranting about the death of media literacy and critical thinking vs an anti-vegan post with zero sources

[en-lov3r]

What if I just dropped dead

[minhanniecoupsie]

[bybdolan]

i think we should establish adding a bibliography to taylor swift song analysis posts. you guys are just saying things and i need proper sources. cite your shit. thank you.

[rotzaprachim]

one of the biggest issues with the current misinformation and/or propaganda discourses is that a lot of people on some level hold the idea that there's a linear separation between "media that is Propaganda" and "True Media, which is Correct and Pure," and that is fundamentally not how the news works, or how history works, or how historiography works. Some news and history is certainly working to push particular points more than others, and not all aspects of the political equation bear equal validity, but a lot of people are refusing to engage with the fact that all news and all media needs to be engaged with critically, and that "read from a variety of sources" isn't a conservative psyop but an attempt to try to counter the fact that every journalist ever - every person every, and certainly every twenty something tiktoker ever - has certain biases. there is no linear, singular, pure "truth." in fact, the acceptance of the idea that there can be some media that is wholly pure versus others that is nothing but pure propaganda is exactly how people buy into propaganda to begin with - because it presents a clean, straightforward, and seemingly just explanation for the world

[ohsua]

siyeon ✧ kcon germany 2024