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Alex Potts's avatar

One extra criticism I'd add to your commendable list is that the pitbull subgroup analysis is literally the "do jelly beans cause cancer?" XKCD strip, where they test 20 different colours of jelly bean and find that the green ones (and only the green ones) cause cancer with confidence p = 0.05.

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LM's avatar

If you were to accept the data, then a ‘people are racist’ interpretation is possible. Other explanations are ‘non-black people are worried that having a stereotypically black dog with a stereotypically black name would make them appear racist’, or that pit bulls with black names grew up in black households, and exhibit racial preference towards humans - there’s at least weak evidence that dogs may take on the racial preferences of their owners: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/canine-corner/201909/can-dogs-be-racist . If you’re adopting a dog with the capacity to eat your face, you may be hyper-attuned to whether it appears to like you.

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