#statistics problems

[livelaughcomma]

See that study about young people up to 25 year olds has a confounding variable fjcking with the study, these are all the ages we force people to be in educational institutions for the most part. So IS it development???? Or is it school brain????

Of course consent is more than yes or no and needs proper understanding as well as equalised power dynamics BUT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT?????? I think you've tagged wrong. Also development is a very weird descriptor for analysing patterns and the age demographics with different patterns. If you have the study I can look at it probably.

Saw some straight-up inexperienced takes on children’s right to consent in the youth liberation tags.

“Children and adults are on the same level and kids can consent! I’m a minor and I can consent! Don’t infantilize me!”

I’m an educator who’s worked with both kids and adults, and I have a near-photographic memory which allows me to remember my early childhood years at a depth most people can’t. I know what I’m talking about, AND I still relate to kids because I remember in exquisite, painful detail what it was like to be one.

It’s not that kids CAN’T consent. Obviously kids can consent or refuse to consent to a lot of things, like saying “yes I want ice cream” or “no I don’t want a hug” or “yes I want the soles of my feet scratched for an hour straight and don’t you dare stop” (I was a weird kid). Any verbal child, with the exception of children who use echolalia to communicate, can give accurate verbal consent (“accurate” in this case meaning that when they say “yes,” it means “yes,” and that they don’t just say “yes” to everything). It stands to reason that they can technically say yes or no to life-altering things such as medical procedures, religions, jobs, or sexual activity… so the issue is not whether or not they are able to consent; the issue is whether or not they have enough lived experience, emotional development, and knowledge to make an informed decision to be responsibly allowed to consent to certain things which are high-risk.

Pedophilia is wrong — not because I think children are always innocent or “dumb blobs” — but because of the inherent developmental power imbalance between a child and an adult. Children are experiencing everything for the first time; adults have already experienced these things many times over and have the responsibility of teaching children what they know without putting them in danger. One does not allow a person who only has a driver’s license to pilot a rocket ship. Why? Because they will crash and kill themselves. Allowing a minor to have sex with an adult is like letting me fly a NASA shuttlecraft with no training.

But if I theoretically were to get trained by NASA for many years, I could perhaps avoid the whole passing out from the G-force routine, and successfully pilot that shuttlecraft. In the same way, children must learn to make small decisions over the course of their lives, until their brain has reached an ample stage of development to safely make decisions about situations which could potentially get them seriously hurt, traumatized, or killed. Abstract thinking, the last stage, takes a long time to fully develop: from the ages of 8 to 25, and even longer in some cases. Obviously bumping the age of consent to age 25 would be excessive because by the time someone is 25, they would have enough lived experience to make an informed decision, whether or not their prefrontal cortex is completely developed or not. This is why in the US, the age of consent ranges from 16–18 years of age; it is close enough to full brain development to keep people safe, and not too far along to maximize freedom of the individual. Laws aren’t perfect and some laws are stupid; but having an age of consent is more than reasonable.

Even though the abstract thinking stage ranges from eight to twenty-five, an eight-year-old and a twenty-five-year-old are NOT on the same level, even if the eight-hear-old is more experienced in one or two areas. Remember, someone who is eight has just begun to develop abstract thinking (or they may not have even started yet); someone who is twenty-five has already been developing abstract thinking for years. Should someone who just started learning chess who cannot beat a computer on easy mode be allowed by a league to compete against someone who’s played in that league for years in a national tournament? No, because that would be demoralizing for the inexperienced player, and unentertaining for the person in the league (unless they’re a bully). There is an inherent power imbalance.

Children need help to navigate complex emotions and situations because everything is new to them, and their brain is not sufficiently developed to handle emotions in a healthy way without guidance and support; this support decreases slightly every year a child is alive if parenting and teaching is consistent in their lives. Children who do not get good adult support often end up traumatized. Children rely on adults; not because of “ageism,” but because it is practical for their physical and emotional health.

This is also the reason why parents often make decisions for children and make them do things they do not want to do. Of course, many children would much rather play than go to the dentist because the dentist is scary and it hurts; but considering that not going to the dentist could result in tooth decay, even if a child does not want to go, a parent should still “force” their child to go to the dentist because the trauma of medical neglect should be avoided at all costs. So a parent should explain to their child that the dentist is there to help them be healthy and happy, to help ease a child’s fear. Most dental and medical procedures ensure that a child will have as much freedom as possible throughout their lives, by preventing them from contracting medical conditions which could potentially inhibit their freedom to do things now, or later in life. Now involuntary intersex surgery for the sake of making a child appear “normal” is another issue entirely, since this deals with a child’s identity. Unless the procedure is done to avoid a life-or-death situation or physical pain, it should not be done at all.

Another thing which absolutely should not be forced on a child is religion. If a child does not fully understand what a Jehovah’s Witness baptism entails, or if they do not know whether or not they will change their mind later due to a lack of experience and foresight, then they should not be presented with the “one-way ticket” option of baptism and effectual “marriage” to a god. This is because a child may not have the experience to recognize the Jehovah’s Witnesses as a predatory organization, especially if their parents have raised them in the cult. If they know that not serving Jehovah — according to their belief system — will get them killed in Armageddon, and that Armageddon could come at any time, including tomorrow, their decision to get baptized, which is a lifelong commitment, will be more motivated by fear than by a genuine desire to serve that god. A parent should not be allowed to punish their child in any way for refusing their religion, and religions should have age restrictions for those rituals which cannot be backed out of without penalty, once performed. This does not mean that children should not be allowed to explore different religions and choose for themselves; it only means that they should be allowed to do so with minimal risk to their mind or body, should they change their mind.

Jobs are something else which a parent should not be allowed to force or encourage a child to get, because play is essential for brain development and specifically for developing creativity. Work is often regarded as the opposite of play due to its exhausting and typically unpleasant nature, so working below a certain age will stunt a child’s growth and make it so they can do less in the long run. Now, if a child has a genuine passion they wish to pursue which most other children do not have, they should, within reason, be allowed to pursue it and potentially make money from it. However, the business side of things should be handled by the parents or another trustworthy adult, until the child is at a stage of development where they capable of handling finances, so that they may focus exclusively on their passion and furthering their education in other areas. However, the money the child earns from their work should not go to the parents; it should go to the child, potentially being placed in a savings account for their future.

In conclusion — I hate to use the “seatbelt or straight jacket analogy” abshsbshsjsjks — children are horribly disenfranchised, yes; but lowering the age of consent is not going to help them become less disenfranchised, compared to many other more feasible and less reckless rules which should be put in place by the law. Adults should be more restricted with what they can do with their children; legal restrictions should not necessarily be removed from what children can do, as many of these laws are reasonable from a scientific perspective.

What these self-proclaimed “xeno-satanists” are proposing can easily be classified as systemic child neglect (Also, side note: xeno-satanism is such a cool-sounding name and I was extremely disappointed to find out they wanted to abolish the age of consent, instead of, like, astral projecting to worship Satan on other planets. Ick. Also, it should be noted that many of these xeno-satanists are minors themselves, at the receiving end of pedophilic relationships and should not be harassed for being abused. Common sense. Don’t add gasoline to the already very hot fire.)

[trappedinafantasy37]

Larian statistics got us like:

[samglyph]

Ghost Hunter Au Part 1/2

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This is my entry for the Malevolent “write in your style event”, @malevolent-monthly!

I wasn’t initially planning on participating since this is a writing event and not an illustration one, but the prompt immediately inspired me so I got the go ahead to make a little comic! Part two out soon.

ID in Alt text provided by @shadow0haven

If you like what I do and want to see more, consider donating to my ko-fi!

[monsterhunterthings]

I contemplated a few other monsters to put in the selection (raths, yian ku-ku, yian garuga, etc.) but I might save them for another fun poll. No nuance option; vote with your heart.

[evilcyclopsxmen]

I need you to answer this question unbiasedly

[tanadrin]

"the lunatic fringe on my opponents' side fundamentally taints their entire movement, which is therefore obviously morally bankrupt and should be ignored. the lunatic fringe on my side is an unrepresentative minority and anybody paying attention to them is a fool/bigot/liar." <- depressingly common pattern. you can't have it both ways!

[bedlamsbard]

it always blows my mind that the Black Death is still around and you yes YOU can get it in the United States of America if you are very unlucky

(it's endemic amongst ground rodents in rural areas in the American West. well, the fleas on the rodents etc., which can jump to other animals.)

it's very treatable though but also like. it's 2024. you always think the Black Death is one of the diseases that got stomped out with prejudice but nope, it's still around!

[lunar-renegade]

i really like that post that's like "vampires don't live in castles because they're vampires. dracula lived in a castle because he's a count" because not only is it true, most vampires can't even do evil magic. *dracula* can do magic because he went to the scholomance, which is a magic school whose headmaster is Literally Satan.

[skymallnine]

Trying to crack Dominion strategy with augments feels a bit like trying to out-wrestle a Vulcan.

Fantastic idea to have your five (5) augments working on this problem! Now let’s just check if the Dominion has dabbled in any gene engineering and… oh. Oh no.

[rotzaprachim]

think i'm going to have a hard time talking through some of this with a well meaning male left wing jewish friend too

[phantomstatistician]

Fandom: Homestuck

Sample Size: 2,302 crossover stories

Source: AO3

Note: This analysis is limited to stories from 2016 - present, as requested.

[guplia]

I hate A levels.

[blueteller]

Aipotu: possibly facing Dragon overpopulation Xiaolen & Nameless 1: not enough Dragons

Me:

Well hello Dragons would you be interested in Free Real Estate-?

[noknowshame]

Okay but can you tell us about that 30-50 page paper, bc that sounds interesting as fuck

oh for sure!

so for context, I am in a phd program studying entertainment media psychology. specifically I study how people perceive and form attitudes towards characters. the paper is for my candidacy exams, which is basically a test that says I am ready to start my dissertation/thesis. there's actually going to be three 30-50 page papers, and I'll spend the entire semester this fall writing them. I'm not allowed to know the exact essay prompts yet, but I at least know what the topics are going to be generally because I decide that

the first paper is going to be on differences in perceptions of fiction versus reality; for instance, do we morally judge fictional characters on the same grounds as real media figures or even people we personally know? the literature on this is just a complete contradictory mess. basically, some argue that our brains are not actually good enough at distinguishing reality from fiction for there to be measurable differences in judgement, while others argue that awareness of fictionality actively allows us to displace our usual sociomoral concerns. my argument is essentially that both are right, and the problem is that researchers are conflating real vs. fictional with entertainment vs. non-entertainment contexts, and the latter is primarily what affects processing differences, because humans are great at judgment in context regardless of whether the fourth wall is the defining boundary (think of what you can do in a boxing ring that you can't do five feet away in the stands). and this isn't even beginning to cover what "real" even means in the first place

it's way more complicated than that (hence 30-50 pages), but that's the gist.

(see below for more on my second and third papers)

I'm hoping my second paper is going to be on the way that entertainment contexts affect the basis on which we form judgements. while you probably hope the people you interact with in real life are morally trustworthy to an extent, it is much more damning for a character to be uninteresting, irritating, or poorly written than it is for them to be immoral. at least in my view. the problem is that for literal decades, every time we've done a study on character judgement (and this includes my own research), we strongly and consistently find that morality is mostly what people base liking or disliking a character on. I tend to think that this is an -us- problem, so my second paper will grapple with that. if we can see with our eyeballs that viewers including ourselves love immoral characters, why can't we get them to tell us that in a research setting? what's wrong with our methods that's creating this gap between real-world observation and experimental findings? I think its character liking that we are measuring incorrectly, but don't even get me started on that

my third question will likely be on how viewer "expertise" affects judgement processes. for example, I have this suspicion that one reason why tumblr users (including myself) think its stupid for people to judge characters like they're real is because we're all really obsessed with narratives in some way and tend to process them from a more external/analytical standpoint than the average viewer. in light of that, I'm interested more broadly in the extent to which different forms of perceived high-level knowledge (e.g., at the scale of text, medium, genre, topic, etc.) change what we pay attention to and therefore how we form attitudes towards characters. this paper is the one I'm most nervous about because its actually like ten different questions in a trenchcoat and I don't know which one my committee will actually want me to talk about

as you may expect, my biggest concern is staying concise and focused. I have way too much to say about all of this, even for a 50 page paper

[chronicallycouchbound]

I can’t live in over 99% of housing.

This is not an exaggeration.

“Less than 1 percent of all units are equipped with features that would allow a wheelchair user to live independently.” HUD.gov

My experiences of homelessness are inherently tied to this.

[shimp]

My problem with people saying two people (two men usually) have a relationship that goes beyond platonic and romantic and can't be labeled is this is always used as a reason why they can't kiss or whatever as if those two things are mutually exclusive