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by ectoplasm 3848 days ago
My 3% came from this article (which I linked, but which is fine to have ignored):

http://www.japan-guide.com/topic/0011.html

The LGBT stat came from Wikipedia. For controversial stuff like that in the US, WP is pretty good. I used to think it was 10-15%, 1 in 7 was the number I learned growing up, I guess it's 1 in 25.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...

For me, "abnormal" generally means "what is wrong with you" (the response given here), whereas "normal" can even include eye-rolling and "oh so you're one of those". The difference between 1 in 33 (3%) and 1 in 666 (0.015%, from the tail end past +3 sigma which accounts for 50% - 99.7% / 2) is really quite palpable.

But again, let's face it: it's not as common as I thought, and it's not as uncommon as you thought.

1 comments

> My 3% came from this article (which I linked, but which is fine to have ignored):

...really? From my reply:

> From that page:

> "About half of the Japanese respondents indicated that they need less than 30 minutes to go to work/school. On the other hand, one fourth of the respondents need more than one hour."

I read and commented on everything that you linked to. The only time 3% appears in that article is "3% take the motorcycle, while 7% indicated not to commute at all." The bar graph that is titled "International comparison of commuting times (one way, in minutes)" has no Y-axis label or grid lines, and is small and low-resolution so determining what percentage is represented by the 120+ minute bucket is tricky at best.

> For me, "abnormal" generally means "what is wrong with you" (the response given here)...

Folks feel that people who are spending four hours every weekday on the road are doing something strange and aberrant because that's an enormous amount of unpaid time to spend doing something required by work. It doesn't matter how much of a population does it, it's aberrant and -to a degree- self-destructive behavior. [0]

> For controversial stuff like [LGBT "membership"] in the US, WP is pretty good.

Sure. I'm making the argument that the studies are suffering from under-reporting. This is something that you have to ask others to disclose, rather than something you can test for.

> But again, let's face it: it's not as common as I thought, and it's not as uncommon as you thought.

No, the Japanese commute time stats sound about right to me. The numbers for Japan were more like what I expected the US numbers to look like, actually.

[0] As always, remember that if I were assigning blame, I would do so explicitly.