Berkson's Paradox

Berkson's Paradox(twitter.com)

127 points by alfongj 5 years ago | 39 comments

alexpetralia 5 years ago |

My favorite article on this: https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the...

Arech 5 years ago | |

Excellent article, thank you very much for sharing! Infinitely better than everything else I read on the topic.

dang 5 years ago |

If curious, past threads:

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)

amelius 5 years ago |

Am I the only one who dislikes this form of presentation, i.e. as a series of tweets?

rrmm 5 years ago | |

The series of tweets for me just wasn't illuminating and I didn't get what the actual 'paradox' was given the graphs. But my issue was more that the graphs weren't clear in pointing out what I should be looking at.

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.

billynomates111 5 years ago | | |

If anyone's impatient like me, this example from wikipedia helped me get it:

> 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.

klyrs 5 years ago | | |

Having selected for interesting content: quality of presentation is inversely correlated to length of a tweet thread?

anitil 5 years ago | |

I always go to threadreaderapp.

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

Dylan16807 5 years ago | | |

> 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.

anonymousiam 5 years ago | |

No, you aren't the only one. It has become even worse now that Twitter will not render without JavaScript enabled. Unfortunately, I still do not know what Berkson's Paradox is because I will not enable JavaScript for Twitter.

anonymousiam 5 years ago | | |

Okay, I googled it. A non-hostile site hosts a definition here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

1vuio0pswjnm7 5 years ago | | |

You do not need to enable Javascript, you only need to change your User-Agent header to one that is acceptable.

lurquer 5 years ago | |

Of the tweets I bother to read, I’ve found that the more interesting the tweet, the more likely it is to be poorly formatted.

/meta

SilasX 5 years ago | |

You're not alone. I think it caught on because a long article (even with pictures) might seem like too much of an investment to a lot of people but a self-contained tweet that keeps getting extended is less intimidating.

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.

rkagerer 5 years ago | |

Yes it's one of the reasons I hate Twitter. It was designed with aversion to substance. Personally, I find older fashioned forums (with small communities of experts) more illuminating.

tejtm 5 years ago |

From the wikipedia page it seems to be a generalization on sampling below the Nyquist frequency can lead to incorrect interpretation of wave forms but in more dimensions.

smitty1e 5 years ago | |

I don't understand why a good book/good movie are even included here.

Two different media for (occasionally) related work.

Calling whatever inverse relation was somehow crafted a "paradox" seems tendentious.

reactchain 5 years ago |

The argument here is that "smart people are worse looking" is actually a case of _of the people you encounter_ smart people are worse looking, but that overall there is no correlation. This makes sense, but I think it's more complex. If you took the entire population, I think you could still conclude the "smart people are worse looking" if you define smart to include non-innate, learned behaviour, for the simple reason that good looking people have an easier time in life (getting jobs and so forth) and are therefore less compelled to spend time and effort becoming "smart". So there's a self-balancing aspect that produces these correlations in the general population as well.

Kranar 5 years ago | |

This doesn't make much sense and I think may actually be another instance of this paradox. For example, why would having an easier time in life dissuade someone from putting in effort to become smart (by your definition of smart)?

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.

reactspa 5 years ago |

As a Taleb follower, this concept seems similar to Survivorship Bias or Selection Bias.

caddemon 5 years ago | |

I'd say it's a type of selection bias, but yeah seems very closely related to survivorship bias.

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.