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X explains Z% of the variance in Y — LessWrong

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The group consensus on somebody's attractiveness accounted for roughly 60% of the variance in people's perceptions of the person's relative attractiveness. I answered that, embarrassingly, even after reading Spencer Greenberg's tweets for years, I don't actually know what it means when one says: X  explains  p  of the variance in  Y .[1] What followed was a vigorous discussion about the correct definition, and several links to external sources like Wikipedia. Sadly, it seems to me that all online explanations (e.g. on Wikipedia here and here), while precise, seem philosophically wrong since they confuse the platonic concept of explained variance with the variance explained by a statistical model like linear regression. The goal of this post is to give a conceptually satisfying definition of explained variance. The post also explains how to approximate this concept, and contains many examples. I hope that after reading this post, you will remember the meaning of explained variance forev

x X explains Z% of the variance in Y — LessWrong Probability & Statistics World Modeling Curated 2025 Top Fifty: 18 % 160 X explains Z% of the variance in Y by Leon Lang 20th Jun 2025 11 min read 36 160 Recently, in a group chat with friends, someone posted this Lesswrong post and quoted: The group consensus on somebody's attractiveness accounted for roughly 60% of the variance in people's perceptions of the person's relative attractiveness. I answered that, embarrassingly, even after reading Spencer Greenberg's tweets for years, I don't actually know what it means when one says: X explains p

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