Berkson's Paradox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18667423 - Dec 2018 (21 comments)
Berkson's Paradox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8264252 - Sept 2014 (20 comments)
Wikipedia was much clearer for me, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox , but ymmv of course.
Another good statistical foible to be aware of along with Simpson's.
> For example, a person may observe from their experience that fast food restaurants in their area which serve good hamburgers tend to serve bad fries and vice versa; but because they would likely not eat anywhere where both were bad, they fail to allow for the large number of restaurants in this category which would weaken or even flip the correlation.
In this case it's https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1373266475230789633.html
Edit to add: In this case I'd recommend wikipedia, the thread is quite short and light on details
To each their own, I guess. Sometimes a short explanation is plenty.
/meta
TBH, I'd say it's less that I dislike this form of presentation than that I hate all the anti-pattern bloat that Twitter adds, like clickable items not being detectable by extensions and previews being cut off.
Two different media for (occasionally) related work.
Calling whatever inverse relation was somehow crafted a "paradox" seems tendentious.
Do you think people who have a hard time in life are compelled to study hard and succeed, as if somehow people living in poverty or in third world countries are putting in significant amounts of effort to become smart? Of course not, not because people in poverty don't want to be smart of course, but because they are compelled to deal with time consuming hardships.
People who have it easy in life are far more compelled to study, to the point that the term "scholar" is literally the Greek word for "leisure".
I wouldn't be surprised if you drew out two axis, one measuring an individual's hardship in life and one measuring how "smart" they are, you'd reveal how paradoxical your statement is. The overall population would show that hardship places a huge burden that inhibits ones ability to learn and pursue intellectual endeavors while having an easier time in life facilitates it... and yet if you then filtered out the bottom left group (hard life and low "smart" score), you'd see the exact inverse correlation that Berkson's Paradox is all about.
Also "survival" taken literally is kinda interesting to think about in this framework. Like say there was some disaster so that the vast majority of people surviving would be either athletic or smart. This subset would likely have a negative correlation between athleticism and intelligence, even if they correlated positively in the general population. Except in this scenario the subset IS your new population.
So I wonder if there are real life traits that correlate negatively across all modern humans, but had no such correlation among our ancestors. Or is there too much regression to the mean with reproduction? Particularly if "opposites attract" is true.
