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I'm probably going to be corrected by some theology major (I don't care) but let me give my best explanation of Calvinism:
Before you're born, it's already predetermined whether you're going to heaven or hell.
"So why, pastor, should I be good and righteous"
"My son, when you sin, it reveals that you're wicked and going to hell. Best, therefore, to abstain from sin."
As a persuasive technique, this probably works just as good as anything. It's often difficult to tease out causality in noisy data. I point this out in the context of Scott's latest post. Look at the graphs here and tell me what you notice:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-polyamory
I notice that choosing to be monogamous or polygamous barely matters at all across many aspects of wellbeing. But there is one key difference: fertility. Polygamous people have many fewer children.
Does polygamy cause infertility or does infertility cause polygamy? Does it matter? It's extremely dysgenic and bound to go the way of the Shakers.
Wait, why does Scott trust Aella’s data? Aella is an internet propagandist for polygamy and promiscuity. Many happy monogamists who find polygamy disgusting would never subscribe to her or follow her. Her monogamist followers are preselected with being unsatisfied with monogamy, and her polygamy followers are preselected with finding polygamy satisfying (hence why they are following a promiscuous woman who talks about it all day). Her most die hard followers are the most likely to take the survey, even just because they see the link more often, and the followers are those who have found the most benefit regardless of how it affects the median polygamist. “Just in, atheists are unsatisfied with atheism, as proven by a survey of atheists who follow Bishop Robert Barron on Twitter.” Am I missing something?
If there are things that are less likely to vary differentially with "how likely am I to see/respond to Aella's poll" then you can trust them more. Not sure how best to evaluate that, though.
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You're making me like her even more than I already did. But yeah, I wouldn't necessarily trust her data unless it confirmed my pre-existing preferences, in which case fuck it.
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If it's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing with Made-Up Statistics.
I'm... skeptical, for a variety of reasons, but the underlying concept isn't obviously wrong. Bad data is still data if it's coming from an honest actor, and for the sort of really clear effects we should care about even a dishonest actor becomes a lot more obvious if they're just completely making things up.
I don't really think that article is applicable here. In Scott's case he's arguing about using made up numbers in the absence of data, not in favor of using whatever data was available. It's easy to imagine ways that data biased in ways you may not know can lead you away from the truth.
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i don't think this is a given, i'm repulsed by the idea of poly relationships and i follow anybody crazy enough to be entertaining on twitter (and the girl who showers once a month yet has time to bang 3 different guys a week is a goddamn spectacle). I could definitely imagine there being some selection bias in the data seeing as she reports polling in Fetlife and some un named "friend’s personality testing website" being about a quarter of the data.
The bigger issue is that it's self reported polling data collected in a somewhat conspicuous way. Anybody with any agenda about how many partners a person should have can add their 2 cents , and polyamorous people aren't going to say "yeah poly prettymuch sucks" on a poll they know people are going to gawk at on twitter.
In practice, "preselected with being unsatisfied" isn't going to mean "every single one is unsatisfied", it just means "being unsatisfied is disproportionately likely". You may be personally satisfied despite this being true.
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That’s probably because you’re interested in diverse ideologies as a personality trait, which themotte userbase is generally selected for. I’m fairly certain that the median social media experience consists of people following accounts they agree with and which propagate their sense of identity. Consider also that in many healthy straight relationships, a person would be reasonably upset with their partner following a prostitute / pro-promiscuity egirl. If this is true, then I do think a whole class of people in healthy monogamous relationships with rules are much less likely to see the poll link, let alone participate in the poll.
I think following on Twitter is a little different to following on OnlyFans, here.
A lot different but a husband would probably still have some explaining to to if a conservative wife fully understood what Aella is. Even more so if the first exposure was one of Alele's thirst posts. You're not getting a divorce over it but it's not going to be a fun conversation.
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My impression is that this can be generalized across quite a few life decisions. People that have a huge amount invested in uncommon decisions that many people told them are bad ideas probably aren't going to regularly proclaim that they should have just listened to the crowd. Some will, of course, but many people will insist that their weird choice is actually excellent and superior to the normies.
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