It's bandied about by the type of person that says "roastie" unironically, and it's probably safe to assume that's where it came from. (Sorry your divorce went so poorly, dude.) You can notice that it presents a peak from 13-18 and a drop-off around the time they describe as "the wall": after 25, the chart presents a precipitous fall and according to the chart, by the time a woman's 27, fewer than half of all men will find her attractive. That is, the data in the chart lines up perfectly with their talking points, and it doesn't resemble anything in the paper. Lately, I've seen it pushed around by the creepy pedo crowd to justify something or another (you people are unreadable), and then recently by someone on Spinster whose point was "All men are pedophiles! HERE'S A CHART!" (Sorry your divorce went so poorly, ma'am.) The chart gets shoved around the internet by people that think it'll bolster their point, and then either tacitly accepted by people they're arguing with or both of them are playing the same game and they didn't even look at the chart before responding with an infographic or an ad hominem or something.
The gullibility is mind-boggling. How does this happen?
The data's presented in a dry, somewhat professional-looking graph. It's easy to understand immediately. No one posting it appears to have read the paper in question: here's a chart! People wouldn't just make up a chart to lie on the internet! Look, it's got a citation! It's got the trappings of legitimacy, but it's completely illegitimate. So my suspicion is that the root cause is laziness, sloppy thinking (confirmation bias is a hell of a drug), and the Twitter Disease, where the goal of every post is to win a stupid political argument on the internet and they don't care if what they're doing is repeating someone else's agitprop because the people they talk to every day are actually Enemies and if you ever lose any ground in a stupid political argument on the internet, $bogeyman wins and all of humanity is plunged into a dark age.
I don't think there's an easy society-wide solution. I think people are going to continue to care about the *appearance* of legitimacy more than they care whether what they are saying is legitimate or not, and the distortion of every human interaction is not going to die off on its own. This is the major problem with totalizing political philosophies, essentially anything that says, in effect, "The personal is the political." (That stuff you can find in Marx and Stalin and Hitler and every other social catastrophe: if there's nothing outside the reach of politics in your view, if every conversation you have involves pushing politics, or if you cannot be friends with someone that doesn't share your politics, you've got the disease.)
That having been said, the possibility of solving the problem in society is a different question from the possibility of solving the problem yourself. That's completetly possible: you can stop being stupid. (Or, at least empirically, I can say that it's possible to successively approximate not being stupid.) You can check primary sources: if someone's point (even if it's your point) relies on a chunk of data, look at the data. Does it hold up? Does the point rely on ignoring any of the data? Where did the data come from? A lot of sociological data uses only people age 18-22, because it's easier to put up a flier outside the dorms and because you can much more easily get an undergrad to trade 2-4 hours of their time for $50 than an adult with kids: this is not exactly a representative sample for everything, as it's clamped to age, it implies an income bracket and a higher education level than a big chunk of the population has. (A somewhat famous series of studies on human sexuality used, for many of its studies, a pool of convicted sex offenders to get the data, probably farther removed from a representative sample than college students; I've touched enough third rails already, you probably know or can guess who it is. Why not go look at the primary sources yourself?)
absurd_data_falsely_citing_hall95.png
hall1995.pdf
I'm with you, and also guilty of spreading questionable click bait amongst closed groups with friends. Thankfully they give me a lot of shit for this so it keeps my feet on the ground in general.
On the flip side, and something that has become palpably worse with Corona, is the politicisation of authoritative sources of research. Hydrochloriquine and Ivermectin suppression are signal examples, although their efficacy is beside the point of this conversation. Both could be useless (something I personally doubt) but this fails to explain the lack of open, transparent scientific discourse on the subject.
This general trend of information control is, I suspect, the cause of the apparent upswing in conspiracy theory and other bullshit. My own view is that such theories and viral social media takes give a noise floor and counterweight to viewpoints with vast marketing and public relations departments. The average bloke on the street might not be able to tell you *why* he believes Covid is a vast global conspiracy to inject 5G into his arm, but his actions generally form a solid bulwark against the most egregious crimes of the state and it's cadres. These conspiracy theories are often symbolically close enough to the powers in play that they can serve as a decent enough risk aversion strategies.
To your point, I think most self aware males who look at the above graph can quickly intuit that it's bullshit - what stories pedos conconct to justify themselves needn't occupy too much thought - although I appreciate that you'll have to deal with far more of this crap than most people, p, so kudos and, frankly, sympathies.
What bothers me is how susceptible our societies are to the "higher" swindles - who really believes that tiktok conspiracy theorists are more of a threat than journals like Nature being selective about what they publish in the name of political expediency? In educated circles if it's not published in a highly ranked journal then it's not worthy of consideration. There is zero willingness to engage in critical thinking beyond googling the counter of a non-published claim.
I've had masters students in molecular biology send me papers about deaths caused by ivermectin, clearly showing that such risks are only caused by extremely high exposure to the tropical parasites it is used to treat. These are intelligent, well meaning friends and they simply don't have the skills/desire to move beyond the walled garden and think critically about the information they are given. These are the people who develop the technologies and run the businesses of tomorrow - and you're telling me that Sharon from the estate sharing dodgy anti-vax memes is a problem?
The appearance of legitimacy indeed.
To be clear, we could all do with being far more circumspect with the data we consume and the care with which we draw conclusions. Yet my concern is the ready willingness of our educated class to be spoonfed it's opinions, rather than the fairly heartening tendency of the less educated to be a little trigger happy calling bullshit on the official line.
