7 ms·
How Correlated Are You?
- Swamfarm 3y agoProbably pretty correlated
- actionfromafar 3y agoWhat’s your baseline?
- tgv 3y agoSurprising article. The conclusion that ear protrusion (yes, that's a thing) has no genetic basis is of course not impossible, but seems unlikely. It would require another data set to establish it.
- z33k 3y agoI have a lot of ear protrusion, which is even more notable due to my large ears. Having seen old pictures of my great grandfather last weekend, it seems clear whose genes for large protruded ears I inherited.
- crackedbassoon 3y agoEar protrusion is heritable: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8500 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8500
- dTal 3y agoWorth noting that not all heritable traits are reflected in DNA, thanks to epigenetics.
- crackedbassoon 3y agoThey estimated SNP heritability via GCTA.
- indeed30 3y agoCouldn't it be possible for ear protrusion to be uncorrelated with the other variables but still have a genetic basis - presumably by depending on a set of genes with little overlap over the ones that govern size?
- blitzar 3y agoI am Causation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tigerlily 3y agoA colleague once pronounced correlation "co-relation" and it made more sense so now I say it that way sometimes. Anyone else do that?
- cassianoleal 3y agoDo people not try to work out the ethymology of words? Everything makes more sense when you know where words came from and how they came to be. :)
- mo_42 3y agoI 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 language and adapt accordingly. In my experience, most people don't see language as a coherent system of words with meaning.
- HPsquared 3y agoMost people are still on step 1 (learning what the individual words mean). They don't get to the stage of learning how the different words fit together.
- atian 3y agoI put quotes around words to differentiate when I’m using them incorrectly but popularly. By definition the goalpost has also been shifted.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoY'all are insufferable good lord. People know how the words fit together. Everyone speaks fine. Not everyone needs to be a big gas etymology nerd about it and in fact nerdly insistence on what a word "actually" means contra its everyday use is an extremely common error. One that wouldn't be made by someone with even the slightest interest in the domain of linguistics, rather than just feeling smarter than people.
- laurieg 3y agoMaybe this is obvious but in the original data, did they exclude rugby players, wrestlers, people with other kind of ear injuries? Cauliflower ear can totally change the shape and size of your ear.
- crackedbassoon 3y agoStrange 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, there should be a correlation between the mean value and the mean correlation with all other parts.
- ckdot2 3y agoHow 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.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThat'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.
- ckdot2 3y agoOf course we can expect errors, I don't doubt that. That's what I mean with "wrong". But still, how should the author consider that if he doesn't know about the precision nor quantity of errors? I just don't think that's the topic of the article. The article is about correlations in the dataset, no matter, if the dataset may contain errors.
- 555watch 3y agoI think the previous poster claims that different measurement process yields different measurement errors (spread). Since correlation coefficient is a function of spread, if the measurement errors are random, even if the underlying relation is the same, it suffices to increase the spread a little bit and get a subsequently smaller correlation coefficient. Confidence bounds for every correlation coefficient would add value and _might_ change some of the interpretations. E.g.: "its average correlation with the other measurements is only 0.03, which is not just small, it is substantially smaller than the next smallest, which is ear breadth, with an average correlation of 0.13." If the former is 0.03 +- 0.02 and the latter is 0.13 +- 0.07, we could claim that both are equal to 0 (or just equal).
- syntaxfree 3y agoAn interesting exercise would have been to run a Gaussian Graphical Model (like the “graphical lasso”) to sparsify that correlation matrix. In the Gaussian case, those methods are able to identify nonzero partial correlations and hence a causal graph. Since there’s multimodality here trust in that interpretation should be lower, but it’s still worthwhile looking at a pseudo/candidate causal structure as part of EDA.
- danjc 3y agoI wonder if they were able to settle how well foot length correlates with other anatomy.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoGuess now there should be an app for this. Or is there? A phone app, to scan you, tell you how correlated you are. LOL Could call the app "Phrenology" Or maybe a dating app "PhrenoloLove"
- amelius 3y agoNo mention of the one size every man is interested in most.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoGiggity
- SamPatt 3y agoI've read height is weakly correlated (which intuitively makes sense, as greater height is more or less synonymous with larger body size). Also the second-to-fourth digit ratio seems correlated. Longer ring finger seems to indicate more testosterone in utero. The (many) other claims appear to be bunk.
- FredPret 3y agoIt 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.
- HDMI_Cable 3y agoI'm not sure if female social capital in gorillas is the reason for the shorter penis size. Because in other primates, like bonobos, for example, where females predominate and have lots of choice, penis size is still small. I think the main reason why is because sex is used in humans for pair-bonding, and many human cultures have much more monogamous lifestyles—raising children together for example. Sex in humans is less for procreation than in monkeys, so larger penis sizes became more adaptive.
- AeiumNE 3y agoI thought it was because apes fight by grabbing and tearing, so with that evolutionary pressure applied you basically end up with the minimum effective protrusion. Also, this is why I plan to avoid fighting apes or at least try to wear some good pants if I do.
- badcppdev 3y ago"6,000 adult US military personnel (4,082 men and 1,986 women)." .... "Despite the presence of reservists in the sample, it is still not an approximation of the US Civilian population" This dataset is from the US military so please remember that when you think about generalising these results to the rest of the world. Since everyone is talking about it Ear Protrusion 'might' be strongly correlated to height IF you don't exclude short people from the sample set.
- legobmw99 3y agoIn particular, the statement that weight is the most correlated of any measurement with all the others seems like it would almost certainly not be true of a general population with a broader spectrum of physical fitness
- krollick 3y agoI wonder how many significant dimensions a principal components analysis would identify for that data set, and if one of them would correspond to male/female.
- AllenDowney 3y agoGreat question -- it is on my list of ideas for a future article!
- svnt 3y agoNot 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.
- Nevermark 3y agoThere 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.
- HDMI_Cable 3y agoInteresting, it seems like then that the old wives tale—that height, foot size, or hand size—should not correlate with that measurement in men. According to the literature (RIP my search history), height is weakly correlated with it [1], while the ratio between the second digit and fourth digit is moderately correlated [2]. Weirdly enough, the 2D:4D ratio has to do with bone lengths, but is still correlated with that measurement. --- [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/ijir201153 https://www.nature.com/articles/ijir201153 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xena 3y agoThis really sounds like a resurgence of AI based phrenology. I wish that our profession took ethics more seriously.