3 ms·

> The World Health Organisation estimates there are 350 million people suffering from depression globally, and that by 2020 it will be the second most widesprea

by jnbiche 11y ago

> The World Health Organisation estimates there are 350 million people suffering from depression globally, and that by 2020 it will be the second most widespread disease in the world. >This is shoddy statistics, but: 350 million people is one quarter of Facebook’s global user base. Admitting that you're using shoddy statistics doesn't somehow excuse it. You can draw absolutely zero conclusions from those two data.

sokoloff 11y ago
Exactly. (Though technically, you can conclude that at least 75% of Facebook's global user base is not suffering from depression.)
- mhurron 11y ago
  > Though technically, you can conclude that at least 75% of Facebook's global user base is not suffering from depression Na, they have other issues ranging from exhibitionism to narcissistic tendencies
- andreasvc 11y ago
  No you cannot. If being a Facebook user is highly correlated with being depressed, the figure could be considerably lower. See Simpson's paradox. If you take a subset of a dataset, you can find the opposite trend or a completely different mean compared to the whole population. This is because the subset can have particular features causing it to be not representative of the whole population.
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    By WHO statistics 350 million people suffer from depression. According to the article, 350 million = 1/4 of Facebook's user base. So at most 1/4 of Facebook users suffer from depression, so at least 3/4 do not.
  - voxic11 11y ago
    Can you elaborate? It seems like simple logic, if 300 million people out of the total population of humans have depression and Facebook has 1200 million users. Then at least 75% of its user base must not be depressed. Because if any more then 75% were depressed then there would be more then 300 million people with depression.
    - will_brown 11y ago
      I doubt this is what the parent comment was suggesting, but... ~10% profiles are fakes/bots x% are duplicates x% are created as business profiles FB has more fake profile than 186 out of 196 countries actually have people, in fact all but the top 10 countries by population. Therefore, more than 75% of FB users (distinct from profiles) could suffer from depression.
    - andreasvc 11y ago
      Oh, my mistake. I didn't realize that was what the 75% figure was based on.

by jnbiche 11y ago

sokoloff 11y ago

Exactly. (Though technically, you can conclude that at least 75% of Facebook's global user base is not suffering from depression.)

mhurron 11y ago
> Though technically, you can conclude that at least 75% of Facebook's global user base is not suffering from depression Na, they have other issues ranging from exhibitionism to narcissistic tendencies
andreasvc 11y ago
No you cannot. If being a Facebook user is highly correlated with being depressed, the figure could be considerably lower. See Simpson's paradox. If you take a subset of a dataset, you can find the opposite trend or a completely different mean compared to the whole population. This is because the subset can have particular features causing it to be not representative of the whole population.
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  By WHO statistics 350 million people suffer from depression. According to the article, 350 million = 1/4 of Facebook's user base. So at most 1/4 of Facebook users suffer from depression, so at least 3/4 do not.
- voxic11 11y ago
  Can you elaborate? It seems like simple logic, if 300 million people out of the total population of humans have depression and Facebook has 1200 million users. Then at least 75% of its user base must not be depressed. Because if any more then 75% were depressed then there would be more then 300 million people with depression.
  - will_brown 11y ago
    I doubt this is what the parent comment was suggesting, but... ~10% profiles are fakes/bots x% are duplicates x% are created as business profiles FB has more fake profile than 186 out of 196 countries actually have people, in fact all but the top 10 countries by population. Therefore, more than 75% of FB users (distinct from profiles) could suffer from depression.
  - andreasvc 11y ago
    Oh, my mistake. I didn't realize that was what the 75% figure was based on.