Haha! You’re right, I spoke too soon. The graph Katja used is the exact same graph used to explain Berkson’s paradox and the pattern match hit me so hard I couldn’t resist commenting. Lesson learned: think about it for 5 minutes before commenting.
Katja’s phenomenon (KP) is not an instance of Berkson’s paradox (BP) but I can see how they would often go together. Imagine that you go down a street and pick up everyone who is particularly tastefully dressed. In this group rich people will be overrepresented simply because they more easily afford good clothes. You could naively conclude from this that wealth correlates with taste. This is KP.
THEN you administer some rigorous test of good taste to everyone in the group (whatever that means). And then you discover that now the rich people in you population are *under*performing relative to the poor. For the simple reason that in your population everyone is either rich or has good taste—all the poor ones have good tastes but not all of the rich do. From this you could naively conclude that wealth *negatively* correlates with taste. This is BP.
How would this work in real life? Maybe a casual observer is more likely to fall to KP and think rich <-> good taste while a fashion expert who works exclusively with well-dressed people will think the opposite?
Haha! You’re right, I spoke too soon. The graph Katja used is the exact same graph used to explain Berkson’s paradox and the pattern match hit me so hard I couldn’t resist commenting. Lesson learned: think about it for 5 minutes before commenting.
Katja’s phenomenon (KP) is not an instance of Berkson’s paradox (BP) but I can see how they would often go together. Imagine that you go down a street and pick up everyone who is particularly tastefully dressed. In this group rich people will be overrepresented simply because they more easily afford good clothes. You could naively conclude from this that wealth correlates with taste. This is KP.
THEN you administer some rigorous test of good taste to everyone in the group (whatever that means). And then you discover that now the rich people in you population are *under*performing relative to the poor. For the simple reason that in your population everyone is either rich or has good taste—all the poor ones have good tastes but not all of the rich do. From this you could naively conclude that wealth *negatively* correlates with taste. This is BP.
How would this work in real life? Maybe a casual observer is more likely to fall to KP and think rich <-> good taste while a fashion expert who works exclusively with well-dressed people will think the opposite?