itaibn0 comments on Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Vaniver 01 April 2013 03:00PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 02 April 2013 12:30:18PM 7 points [-]

How many people will agree with a statement depends on what typeface it's written in.

Comment author: itaibn0 02 April 2013 08:39:17PM *  3 points [-]

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:

But this analysis gives us a way to quantify the advantage to Baskerville. It’s small, but it’s about a 1% to 2% difference — 1.5% to be exact, which may seem small but to me is rather large... Many online marketers would kill for a 2% advantage either in more clicks or more clicks leading to sales.

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.

Comment author: gwern 03 April 2013 03:52:10AM *  2 points [-]

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

Comment author: gwern 16 June 2013 10:30:24PM 0 points [-]

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.

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