Equation 4 · Forty Million Clicks Through One Uneven Door
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It is also worth noting, in fairness to the paper, that Extended Data Table 2’s four regressions do not read as a story fitted to confirm itself: several of the sixteen reported coefficients are small and statistically indistinguishable from zero, including individualism’s association with sparing higher-status characters ( = 0.02 ) and rule of law’s association with sparing females ( = 0.24 , not significant at conventional thresholds) [ 1 ] . A purely confirmatory analysis would be unlikely to publish its own null results this openly. But a differential-turnstile process would not predict uniformly strong correlations across every cell either — it would predict exactly the…
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It is also worth noting, in fairness to the paper, that Extended Data Table 2’s four regressions do not read as a story fitted to confirm itself: several of the sixteen reported coefficients are small and statistically indistinguishable from zero, including individualism’s association with sparing higher-status characters ( = 0.02 ) and rule of law’s association with sparing females ( = 0.24 , not significant at conventional thresholds) [ 1 ] . A purely confirmatory analysis would be unlikely to publish its own null results this openly. But a differential-turnstile process would not predict uniformly strong correlations across every cell either — it would predict exactly the uneven pattern actually reported, strong where a macro variable plausibly gates internet access or platform virality and weak where it does not. The paper’s candor about its own nulls is real and creditable. It does not, on its own, distinguish the two accounts of why the significant cells are significant.
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