this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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firstly, I did get a report to remove this post (which I understand and considered), but I think it's worthwhile to point out to people why you have to think critically about articles like this.
Substack really isn't the venue for such controversial and possibly damaging work to be done. This desperately needs peer review to examine the survey methodology and data interpretation before we draw any conclusions like the author did.
Surveys are extremely complicated because it's so easy to bias with the selection of the respondents, how you phrase the questions, and all kinds of other things. While the author clearly did put some effort into that, we don't know their qualifications (as far as I can tell "Aella" is a pseudonym), and even if we did sometimes qualified people make mistakes. That's the value of peer review - other experts can examine the process and offer feedback before it gets published.
Publishing such conclusions all on your own is (at best) unintentional fear mongering that can hurt real people.
Thanks. I'm not intending to push anything here. She has some other interesting articles and I came across this one on her blog while I was reading those. Didn't really see any discussion online about it, and thought this would be a good community for evaluating the claims. I'm coming from a place where I think stuff like this that tries to make concrete claims from data is best discussed and picked apart, especially since it didn't come across as bad faith to me, but I can understand that might not be a view shared by everyone.