Editing 2618: Selection Bias

{{comic
| number    = 2618
| date      = May 11, 2022
| title     = Selection Bias
| image     = selection_bias.png
| titletext = We carefully sampled the general population and found that most people are familiar with acquiescence bias.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a DIE THAT ROLLS NUMBERS LIKELY TO RESULT IN MORE ROLLS - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
[[Blondie]] is [[:Category:Public speaking|giving a talk]] at the conference "Statistics Conference 2022." By show of hands she and the audience learns that most of the listeners are familiar with {{w|selection bias}}. She uses this to state that it's a term most people know.

The joke is that she is thus falling for the very thing she's trying to explain. A statistics conference is likely to have an audience consisting of professional statisticians, or at least people interested in the subject, and it is expected that most of them would thus be familiar with any main stream statistical term, like selection bias. Had she asked a random sample of people in the street, many of them would likely not be sure what selection bias is. This effect is also the subject in [[2357: Polls vs the Street]].

This joke also ties into how statistics as a whole can be highly counter-intuitive and sometimes almost paradoxical, where things like the {{w|Monty Hall problem}} and {{w|survivorship bias}} lead people into thinking the answer to a problem is definitely in a place it's not. That Blondie, presumably a statistician herself, made this kind of mistake is professionally embarrassing but not unprecedented.

The title text refers to {{w|Acquiescence bias}}, which is the tendency of people to respond positively to positive questions, for example "Are you familiar with the famous webcomic {{xkcd}}?" is more likely to generate the answer yes than "Are you familiar with that webcomic for engineers that nobody else understands until they go to [[Main_Page|Explain xkcd]]?"

==Transcript==
:[Blondie is standing on a podium behind a lectern with a microphone. She is standing under a hanging sign with large text. In front of the podium is an audience of five seated persons all with their hands raised above their heads. The audience includes two guys that look like Cueball, Hairbun and two other persons with hair, that cannot be identified.]
:Sign: Statistics conference 2022
:Blondie: Raise your hand if you’re familiar with selection bias. 
:Blondie: As you can see, it’s a term most people know... 

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Blondie]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairbun]]
[[Category:Public speaking]]
[[Category:Statistics]]
[[Category:Cognitive Bias]]