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How Correlated Are You?

allendowney.com

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#31
post #25

No mention of the one size every man is interested in most.

It would be interesting if there's a correlation with other things made of cartilage like the nose and ears.

It's interesting to note that we humans evolved vastly bigger penises than the other monkeys (silverback gorillas are much larger than men but sport 1.25-inchers) due to women having much more choice / social capital than female gorillas.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#32
Not having reviewed the full list of measurements, everything other than ear protrusion mentioned seems to involve bone structure.

The ears, especially their protrusion as measured, have little or no relationship to bone structure. The other measurements with low correlation to bone structure also have low correlation across the collection of measurements.

Ear protrusion probably has some relationship to other developmental signatures, just not limb length etc.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#33
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do somehow because of my inherent interest in understanding the world. However, this got me intro communication issues with my former boss. Apparently, this person was not interested in what words (or combinations of words) actually mean but rather simply just how they're used frequently. Every new combination of words was utterly confusing to this person. As a conclusion, I try to figure out how people process lan…

If you're interested in that sort of thing, on mental model that makes sense is people keep a little blob of context in their head, and use the words coming in to update the blob. Then at the end of the sentence they guess what you meant and respond to that, blind to what you was actually said as the tape recorder hears it. Which would be a very sensible way of working for people who don't have a lot of short term me…

Kind of like garden path sentences. Famous garden path sentences like "the old man the boat" are crafted to parse to obvious nonsense on the first iteration, forcing the reader to do backtracking. But when proofreading texts it's not uncommon to find unintentional garden path sentences that are easy to misunderstand, especially in English. Some politicians are great at doing that on purpose. But crafting sentences that only make sense on first parsing but are actually nonsense on second glance is kind of next level, some kind of inverse garden path sentence.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#34
post #32

Not having reviewed the full list of measurements, everything other than ear protrusion mentioned seems to involve bone structure. The ears, especially their protrusion as measured, have little or no relationship to bone structure. The other measurements with low correlation to bone structure also have low correlation across the collection of measurements. Ear protrusion probably has some relationship to other develo…

There is another measurement for men that involves a body part without bone structure.

Perhaps this report settles once and for all, what proportion of normally more visible measurements are true correlates with that measurement.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#37

Strange that an article by someone interested in Bayesian statistics (according to the website banner) would not consider measurement error here. It seems likely to me that ear measurements are harder to make accurately than measurements of larger body parts, which would drive down the correlations. Furthermore, I suspect that measurement error is inversely proportional to the size of the part being measured. If so,…

How would you consider that? The article states that all the calculations were based on the ANSUR-II dataset. If the values in that dataset were wrong, of course the results of the calculations may not be correct.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#38
post #37

Strange that an article by someone interested in Bayesian statistics (according to the website banner) would not consider measurement error here. It seems likely to me that ear measurements are harder to make accurately than measurements of larger body parts, which would drive down the correlations. Furthermore, I suspect that measurement error is inversely proportional to the size of the part being measured. If so,…

How would you consider that? The article states that all the calculations were based on the ANSUR-II dataset. If the values in that dataset were wrong, of course the results of the calculations may not be correct.

That's not really how measurements work though. All real-world measurements have precision associated with them. It's not a matter of measurements being correct or being wrong.

As GP hints at, since you don't measure an arm the same way you measure an ear, it's reasonable to expect the errors to have different characteristics.

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