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army1987 comments on Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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How many people will agree with a statement depends on what typeface it's written in.
From this day forward all speculation and armchair theorizing on LessWrong should be written in Comic Sans.
For some reason, my mind is picturing that sentence written in Comic Sans. (Similar things often happen to me with auditory imagery, e.g. when I read a sentence about a city I sometimes imagine it spoken in that city's accent, but this is the first time I recall this happening with visual imagery.)
<font color=green>
Shouldn't it? Isn't epistemic hygiene correlated with font choice in known cases? I mean, if someone posts something in Comic Sans ...
I'd expect that to be mostly screened off by e.g. grammar and wording, though. (If I had read that passage about asteroids as existential risk written in Comic Sans, I would probably have assumed that the person who chose the font wasn't the same person who wrote the passage.)
Eyeballing this, the effect size is tiny. Looking at their own measurements, it is statistically significant, but barely.
ADDED: Hmm... I missed the second page. Over there is more explanation of the analysis. In particular:
Point taken. This is large enough that it might be useful. However, I don't think it is a large enough bias to be important for rationalist.
Depends. It would certainly be interesting to know for, say, the LW default CSS. I think I'll A/B test this Baskerville claim on gwern.net at some point.
EDIT: in progress: http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts
My A/B test has finished: http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts
Baskerville wasn't the top font in the end, but the differences between the fonts were all trivial even with an ungodly large sample size of n=142,983 (split over 4 fonts). I dunno if the NYT result is valid, but if there's any effect, I'm not seeing it in terms of how long people spend reading my website's pages.