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Traffic to this blog is\\xa0declining. I need to act decisively to draw people back. Write something so interesting it can\\u2019t\\xa0help\\xa0but go viral. I\\u2019m going to write about\\u2026negative results from the perception questions on last year\\u2019s survey.

The last SSC survey had a lot of optical illusions and visual riddles. I had hoped to expand on some of the work in\\xa0Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions\\xa0and\\xa0Can We Link Perception And Cognition?\\xa0This post is a very brief summary of results and, basically, an admission of failure. While I was able to replicate the same suggestive results as in the last survey, I was unable to expand on them, strengthen them, or really turn them into any kind of interesting framework.

I was able to weakly replicate the headline result from\\xa0Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions: transgender status still correlated with all three mask illusions, and with the average of all three mask illusions, but very weakly: r = -0.04, p = 0.001. This was true even when I excluded everyone who took place in last year\\u2019s survey, providing an independent confirmation of the result. But with correlations this low, it\\u2019s hard to get too excited.

I was also able to weakly replicate the headline result from\\xa0Can We Link Perception And Cognition?. I haphazardly gave people a \\u201cweirdness score\\u201d based on them having more mental illnesses, more unusual political opinions, and more minority sexual/gender identities (without looking at their illusion results). People with higher weirdness scores consistently had more ambiguity-tolerant results on illusions, with correlations around r = 0.05 for most tests. They also had notably higher average Tolerance of Uncertainty Test scores. But none of these results were very striking and there was minimal individual structure in them. If I was going to take this further I would have come up with a more principled definition of weirdness, but at this point it doesn\\u2019t seem worth it.