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Seems reasonable to dismiss Aella’s experience as an outlier and criticize her surveys as less than rigorous (As an aside, if they are in fact rigorous I’d love to see some sort of review, I’ve been wondering about this).
Meghan loses a few points for refusing to answer the “what would change your mind” tactic, but I think if it was a boxing match she would have scored more points. It felt a little bit like a boxing match.
About the best defense you can get for Aella's surveys is that their problems -- terribly limited and self-selected sample, minimal randomization, anchoring, etc -- are also endemic in mainstream social science and no small amount of 'harder' sciences, and at least she's not promoting the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Which is true, and also damning with faint praise.
((That said, the implied 'people only care because vagina' seems a little in tension with the people in this very thread (including anti-porn people) linking to multi-hour videos by rando doctors or 'doctors'. The ratsphere is nothing if not masturbatory in the less literal sense, after all.))
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They’re comically unrigorous. Barely internally valid and definitely not externally valid. We learn less than nothing about the world from them. I have no idea why people pay so much attention to her (just kidding, I do). The whole community’s obsession with her is really embarassing tbh.
This critique is vague on the details. What about her surveys exactly are so bad that we learn less than nothing?
Not the person you replied to, but I am concerned that Aella doesn't care much about representativeness of the sample, instead prefering to boast about how many people filled in the survey (over 500,000 now!)
Aella claims that large sample sizes are helpful to extract statistically significant data on rare subgroups, but the Lizardman Constant shows that's not true. For example, if only 1 in 1000 people are Freemasons, you can't collect good data on Freemasons by sampling even 1,000,000 people, because according to the Lizardman Constant of 4%, you would get 40,000 responses from people falsely claiming to be Freemasons drowning out the results from the 1,000 real ones. Aella seems oblivious to this.
There are other obvious reasons why the results to Aella's kink survey would be biased, e.g.:
People who aren't kinky are going to be less inclined to take a survey on kink, and it's not obvious how to control for that.
Normal people with a fulltime job and a family and/or a social life don't spend a lot of time filling out surveys on TikTok. So the results are likely going to be biased towards terminally online weirdos, and it's not obvious how to control for that.
This isn't just conjecture; it's obvious in the results she's reported so far are not representative at all. For example, in The mental illness gap between cis and not-cis females she reports that trans-identified females are almost 5 times more likely to suffer from autism than normal females. Seemed interesting, and definitely plausible. But then I noticed that about 50% of all female respondents claimed to suffer from clinical depression, while more than 20% identified as transgender. Both of these figures are waaaay above the base rates in the overall population, even in the US, even if you account for the fact that females and young people are more likely to id as trans.
So either the sample is extremely biased, or people are lying about a lot of stuff, or both: either way, this doesn't bode well for the validity of other results.
My concern is not so much this bias itself. Lots of academic research is biased, as Aella pointed out on the stream (also known as the WEIRD bias). My concern is that Aella is not really willing or able to acknowledge the limitations of her own research. For example, on the stream she claimed that 93% of women consumed erotica. Only when Murphy challenged her did she admit this was 93% of respondents: but as I pointed out these are going to be biased towards more kinky people.
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You learn about how the people who follow her on Twitter answer the questions she posts on Twitter. To try to generalize that into something broader is the problem.
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It's a glib snipe at Aella being female, I assume.
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Oooh, nice-- are there some examples of badness that stand out to you? Or do you have a link to a critique? I would not be surprised if there are some critiques out there, but I'm also wary of the elitist "she's not an academic so she can't do anything of value." On the other hand it seems like the number of responses she gets are sometimes huge, so presumably there are some tricks you can do with a big dataset?
To be fair, she has a unique perspective and is really weird. That on its own is enough to be interesting, but she's also (arguably) hot and talks about sex things, which I imagine is what you're referring to.
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