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[–]Drachefly 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Crossposting to r/mylittlepony

[–]SilasX 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I want to learn about Equestria's intellectual property system, since my interest was piqued by Rainbow Dash's reference to her "patented" blow-dry system in the pilot.

[–]algorithmoose 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Oh, so in magical mystery cure, Celestia uses CRISPR to alter Twilight's genome. Equestria is a technological utopia.

"this has the serious defect of requiring Unicorn & Pegasi families to have much lower fertility or severe infant mortality rates (which are not supported in canon and are rather against the spirit of the show)"

They should read Rainbow Factory.

[–]gwern 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Oh, so in magical mystery cure, Celestia uses CRISPR to alter Twilight's genome.

Who better to know how to use CRISPR than a country apparently fed almost entirely on delicious crispy apples (and carrots)?

They should read Rainbow Factory.

No thanks, I just had some cupcakes.

[–]SamJoesiah 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"this has the serious defect of requiring Unicorn & Pegasi families to have much lower fertility or severe infant mortality rates (which are not supported in canon and are rather against the spirit of the show)"

I'm pretty sure earth ponies having huge families is a running joke in the show. Like their population is growing so fast they're pushing out the Indians settling the prairie and putting up new towns all over the place.

[–]SchizoidSocialClubIQ, IQ never changes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The entire piece is amazing.

[–]indianola 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This man seems lovely. Shame he's not in Ohio.

[–]Eratyx -1 points0 points  (14 children)

Okay, but why? It was a throwaway joke in a kid's cartoon with maybe a few nerds on staff.

[–]SamJoesiah 28 points29 points  (3 children)

The question isn't "why would Gwern do this" but "who's going to stop him?"

[–]sonyaellenmann[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

there's this arcane concept called "humor"

[–]Russelsteapot42 11 points12 points  (8 children)

This is why

Thus, we can state with a 95% confidence that between 4.0% and 6.8% of the internet-using US population strongly identify as bronies, or approximately 7 to 12.4 million people.

[–]leplen 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is why

Answers in the 5% range to questions like this are pretty unreliable.

[–]HeyIJustLurkHere 1 point2 points  (6 children)

I'll take the under on 7 million. If I'm wrong, I give you $10. If I'm right, you give me $390. Deal?

[–]Russelsteapot42 0 points1 point  (5 children)

How would we go about determining the 'true' number?

[–]leplen 1 point2 points  (4 children)

We can run our own surveys pretty easily, and actually vet them for things like completion time, etc. to remove the people who click through online surveys blindly for the Google play store rewards/whatever other incentives.

The state of the herd reports do a little bit of survey quality due diligence, but looking at their demographics they're claiming 75% of bronies are between 15-25, and 80% of them are male. Since there's not a strong age skew by gender, this means ~60% of bronies are males in the 15-25 age range. There are about ~24.2 million males in that demographic nationally, which means if 60% of the 7 million estimated figure falls in that range then that's 4.2 million, or 17% of all males in that range. This is more than 1/6 males in that range strongly identifying as a brony.

That seems really, really unlikely.

[–]gwern 1 point2 points  (3 children)

We can run our own surveys pretty easily, and actually vet them for things like completion time, etc. to remove the people who click through online surveys blindly for the Google play store rewards/whatever other incentives.

FWIW, they say they use Google Surveys. Unless it's changed considerably, the primary source is people clicking through to news websites. GS also includes completion time in milliseconds (last field). I ran a bunch of catnip surveys on Google Surveys recently and I put up all the CSV exports so you can see what data GS gives you: eg https://gwern.net/doc/catnip/2017-08-10-gs-uk.csv

You also have a bit of a problem. If you don't believe their initial 2013 GS results, where do you expect to get a probability population survey with responses which is of even higher quality in 2018, and why do you think the 2018 results would give as large or larger population size estimates if the 2013 ones were right...?

[–]leplen 1 point2 points  (2 children)

recently and I put up all the CSV exports so you can see what data GS gives you

Thanks, this is neat.

You also have a bit of a problem

​

I have lots of problems, the biggest one is that we're talking about survey data that is probably 4-5 years old (there's no obvious date attached to the result, but the linked status of the herd reports are from that time frame), but MLP fandom hasn't been static over that time period, but appears to show marked declines:

MLP google trends. (60%-70% decline)

Brony google trends (80+% decline)

​

My confidence in the statement there are currently between 7 and 12.4 million people who strongly identify as bronies in 2018 is significantly lower than 95%.

There wasn't any filter on response time in the reported results, and the response distribution looked a little strange to me, especially the small percentage of 4 star responses. While looking at your dataset it appears that Google gives you the ability to control for time spent on question, it doesn't look like that was done in this instance.

My prior that any given counter-intuitive survey or analysis result performed by a random person I don't know is true is fairly low. The speedster completion hypothesis was the first possible failure mode that comes to mind, but without access to the underlying data set it's all conjecture.

[–]gwern 1 point2 points  (1 child)

From the ordering on their main page, I'm fairly sure it was 2013, yes.

Between the temporal decline in MLP popularity (which I find odd because, aside from the songs, I don't see any real decline in MLP quality over the 8 seasons so far), changes from using an entirely different survey service (or if you reuse GS, any changes in them over the past 5 years), changes in question, and changes in analysis, I'm not sure what running a survey now would prove. Any of those variables is adequate to explain a large difference from their 2013 to your 2018. It's comparing apples to pears.

It might be worthwhile to reuse their exact question & GS, and get an apples-to-apples comparison to see what the trend is, but you can't use that to 'refute' the original estimate.

[–]leplen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed.
I don't think there's anything I could do that would reliably refute the original results, since no one has developed a time-machine-cum-survey-service that would allow me to run novel surveys 5 years in the past.
I think the original claim of there currently being 7-12 million bronies is falsifiable, and probably false, especially given the apparent decline in the fandom.