• vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    I once got told that if I even tried to defend or discuss my point of view (after the first and only comment on that thread), I’ll be banned. Because I said that if you randomly pick out someone from a random population, you’re less likely to pick a minority, because they’re a minority. And that’s how statistics works.

      • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        The point was about proportional representation in media. The key word there was proportional.

        If I picked all my actors by picking names out of a hat (meaning it’s impossible to discriminate), there is a high chance that there won’t be a lot of asians in my result. But that’s not because I have anything against asians, but simply because I live in a mediterranean country, and there are far fewer asians here than you’d find in asia. So even if I ended up with 19 mediterranean people, and one asian person, that’d be a proportional representation.

        But I was the aggressor for not agreeing that “biasing the results but only if you personally don’t like them” is good proportional representation.

        And calling me the aggressor for stating an objective, undisputable mathematical fact in a relevant discussion is exactly why it’s a toxic echo chamber. The truth there is decided by majority. Not by the real world.

    • legless velociraptor@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Beside the point, but maybe still worthmentioning: if the “majority” is in truth just another minority, but the biggest one, with, say, 15% of the population, and therefore by default calls itself the majority, you’re still more likely to pick an individual of one of the 24 other minorities. What you’re unlikely to do, is to pick an individual of a specific minority, no matter which one. The “least unlikely” is an individual of said “majority”, because it’s the biggest minority. It’s still relatively unlikely, though, and likelier to pick an individual of some other minority, just not any specific one.

      • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        yes, but you still have a higher probability of picking one of those than any other individual one of the others. you do have a higher probability of picking any other than that single one, but that’s not saying much. If you pick a random sample, the biggest minority will still be the biggest minority.