Comments on: Let’s Bet on Talk

By: Stagyar zil Doggo

Stagyar zil Doggo — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 04:26:53 +0000

Here are the contract specific rules as stated on Intrade. -
——————-
For this contract to settle (expire) at 100 ($10.00) the following conditions must be met:

1. The study must be first reported on or after July 10th, 2007
2. The study must find that women talk exactly 10% or more then men over a typical whole day
3. The study must include more then just university students, but need not include university students

This contract will settle (expire) at 0 ($0.00) if the next study finds that women do not talk exactly 10% or more then men.
——————-

I suspect that the point 2. above has been misstated, or at least sounds ambigous. More precise statements could be that -
… women talk exactly 10% or more in excess of men … or,
… women talk exactly 110% as much as men or more …

You should also add restrictions as to what sample size, and/or level of statistical significance would be considered acceptable for settling this contract.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:41:43 +0000

Mark, how many words people say per minute of conversation and how many words they say per day sound like very different questions to me – the difference of course being: how many minutes a day do people converse?

By: Mark Liberman

Mark Liberman — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:12:16 +0000

The large amount of within-group variation, and the smallness of the between-group differences in comparison, was the whole point of the research.

For graphs of the whole distribution of word counts from a more representative sample of Americans (all ages, regions and educational levels), see here.

Those are word counts from brief (10-minute) telephone conversations — but many other studies, of many other sorts of interactions, from a number of different countries, all show essentially the same results.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:16:32 +0000

You can now bet on this topic at InTrade!

By: rvman

rvman — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:08:06 +0000

I’d hazard that this ‘recording’ had a tendency to suppress some people, and encourage others to ‘perform’, even at 1 in 25 for any given statement to be recorded. I, for one, would feel weird about going straight back to my room to watch TV or study all afternoon, but I’d also be self-conscious about talking. If men were more likely to ‘perform’ while women more likely to be suppressed, this would skew the samples. I don’t know how to adjust for this observation effect, if it exists, short of secretly bugging a sample, which strikes me as unlikely to get past the human subjects ethics committee.

By: Loki on the run

Loki on the run — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:01:43 +0000

Also interesting is that men had a larger variance than women.

By: Brad Hutchings

Brad Hutchings — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 06:44:47 +0000

Thanks Chi. Now that is pretty interesting! And it sure tells a very different story than the abstract. Why focus so much on the average and not the wide distribution of data points? Sometimes I don’t get academics .

By: Joseph Hertzlinger

Joseph Hertzlinger — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 03:14:46 +0000

Do swear words count?

By: Chi

Chi — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 22:40:26 +0000

Brad, they do just that at the last paragraph of page one, and the rest of page 2 in the Supplemental data (that you can’t see, heh) at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/317/5834/82/DC1/1

Summarized, the results are:
* Both men and women’s word counts were positively skewed, but of the six groups of subjects, all mens’ subgroups had higher skews than the womens’.
* Men and women were equally represented (50/50, although total participation was 47/53) in the top 17% of word users from each subgroup.
* The top 3 word users drawn from the total pool were men

So this makes the hypothesis that: a few chatty women serve as outliers we all remember, unlikely.

Visually, in the histogram for word usage of men vs. women, it looks like the women’s peak is slightly higher (mode ~16000) than the men’s (mode ~10000), with more men in the high tail (reaching ~48000/42000).

By: Brad Hutchings

Brad Hutchings — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 22:00:46 +0000

Above, I’m talking about the usefulness of a conclusion like “women talk only slightly more than men on average”. I’d like to see the actual distributions, not statistics about them. Each data point is obviously bounded on the low end by 0, but not necessarily by 2x the average on the high end. The Science article is behind a paid firewall. I assume it has the pictures I want unless the study was striving to be politically correct blather. The men have a flatter distribution. I’d bet its a little heavier on one end too. If the peculiarities of the distributions are left out of the popular narrative, it seems to me something is lost. Isolate and compare the top 50%, 25%, 10% of both groups. How do things look?

If the point was just to debunk the 20K v. 7K figure, well, ok, duh. Experience is gonna tell you there would be lots of variance in a result that showed that too.