Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
If you have a big enough sample, you can ask if the average only child scores higher "Openness" than the average reader, or if their self-reported IQ is higher. That's a meaningful comparison I believe.
7. I plan to confirm or disprove, once and for all,
whether our community has more older siblings. For lack
of a fancier way to do this, I’ll take the set of all
people who have exactly one sibling, and see what
percent of them are older vs. younger. If it’s
significantly above 50% older, I’m going to interpret
this as a birth order effect. I’ll do the same with the
set of people who have two siblings, three siblings,
etc, and combine them all for a final determination.
Half-siblings will be ignored. If you have any problems
with this methodology, tell me now.But I checked the data I received before and after I posted that, and the birth order effects are about equally strong throughout.
Of the before-posting people, 2199 had exactly one sibling, and 71.1% of those were the older.
Of the after-posting people, 776 had exactly one sibling, and 72.3% of those were older.
A t-test revealed no difference between the two groups, p = 0.527.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male...
Big5 is a valid personality test-- it gets decent test/re-test scores, but it's still weak. Myers-Briggs fails because, despite being very similar to the Big5, it doesn't have good enough test/re-test scores.)
Scott cites another study that says when you test openness properly, you get a wider distribution. So if you pair those two together, you get a decent sized effect. Maybe.
I think it's more likely a measurement error, or some subtle statistical effect caused by a combination of probability skewing and demographic changes.
Can you elaborate?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRrops3J...
Consider just the bins 20 (ages 10-20), 30 (ages 20-30) and 40 (ages 30-40). We can see that, of the three groups, teens are by far the least likely of these groups to read the blog, and people in their 20s are the most likely.
Now consider two groups of two-sibling families that lie within this range, where one sibling is in one bin, and the other the next. E.g. the first group where one is a teenager, the first-born is in their twenties, and the second where one is in their 20s, and the first-born is their 30s.
Case 1: If you take a random family from the [teen, 20s] group, how likely is it that the reader from this family is younger or first-born sibling? Since those in their 20s are much more likely to read the blog, it is much more likely that the reader is in their 20s, and is the first-born.
Case 2: Now take a random family from the [20s, 30s] group. How likely is it that the reader is the younger sibling or the first-born? In this case, because readers in their 20s are more common than readers in their 30s, it is more likely that the reader is the younger sibling.
However, the ratio of readers in their 30s to readers in their 20s is much closer than that between the 20s and teens. This makes it more likely in that in case 2 that the reader is still the first-born. Therefore, if the number of families in each group is equal, we would expect to see, in aggregate, more first-born readers than younger siblings.
I'm not saying that this is happening in the actual data, you'd need to do more analysis, and probably need more data about the ages of siblings, or that it is a significant enough effect to cause the result found. But it demonstrates that statistical analysis can involve subtle effects that are not obvious without careful consideration. As such, we should be very wary of making any conclusions about causes, either birth order or anything else.
Personally, I mulled over it for a while and I don't see any mere "statistical" effect that's plausible. I think we are forced to conclude there's a psychological difference with firstborns.
Yet, "oldest children are more conservative, youngest children are more creative, etc." and the oldest being more intellectually curious describes them perfectly.
So, anecdotally, my study of 1 data point says it's probably nuture and not nature.
The only positive thing I took out of that class was the number of other students going "this is bullshit, I'm a first child and am the rebel of the family" or whatever. And it was a good introduction to not trusting authority.
If it isn't, wouldn't we state so? I am looking for an utilitarian valid and true argument.
Of course people should know where they come from and what does that mean, just as it's usually important to tell kids if they are adopted or have some serious congenital problem. (Usually because it can mean life or death, as we all seen it in [medical] dramas where people search for organ donors and so on.) But the question of when and how to tell is a big one, and there are probably many good answers, but alas probably all of them are forged in hard compromises between hurting the kid now, or letting them finding it out by accident.
I'd say that only applies if you want it to. Otherwise, are you suggesting that there's a specific age which one needs to reach in order to grok basics of statistics?
Because it isn't and history is full of examples showing it isn't.
Circumstances (social, economic, etc) might sway things in certain directions, but in the same way we can't predict the weather a year out with 100% certainty, it's impossible to predict the course of a human being's life a year from now, let alone 10 or 20.
And that isn't even taking into account changing environments. Ask someone in the 1950's if Obama would become president and most would probably have said "no way"
It's also detrimental and discouraging to people even attempting to achieve their potential. It's like the photo of the horse tied to a chair by a rope. The horse only believes it can't move because it's been trained to think that is its reality.
Philosophies are really only important and useful in as much as they produce a certain result. History is also full of examples of those philosophies being used by the ruling class to suppress their "inferiors" in order to maintain their positions of privilege. Then you get things like the French Revolution.
Not only it will harm/limit your potential to achieve but the exploitation will be rampat
1. Have seen Scott express the opinion that first-born children are more intelligent.
2. Interpreted that claim in a way incompatible with your own experience of being an intelligent second-born (e.g., taken Scott to be saying first-borns are always more intelligent).
3. Been sufficiently offended (or otherwise unimpressed) by this to stop reading his blog when you would otherwise have been happy to read it.
For this to explain the apparent firstborn bias in Scott's survey respondents, thousands of potential readers would need to have done this. So, how plausible is it?
1. I've been reading Scott's blog for years and don't remember ever seeing him say anything like "first-born children are more intelligent" before this post we're discussing now. That doesn't mean he never did, and I'd be extremely unsurprised to find that he did -- but it does suggest that if he did it was easy to miss.
2. The distinction between "on average firstborns have an IQ one point or so higher than non-firstborns" and "firstborns are always smarter than not-firstborns" is not exactly subtle.
3. Well, anyone can get upset about anything, but this really doesn't seem to me like the sort of thing that would make thousands of people swear off an otherwise interesting blog in disgust.
I'm going to rate it very implausible. No way is anything remotely like this a non-negligible fraction of the explanation for the apparent firstborn bias in Scott's survey respondents.
I'd never heard of the supposed higher intelligence of first born, but I've heard a lot about the sporting side and anecdotally I've noticed it too (I am the oldest sibling in my family).
It's interesting nevertheless.
It’s hard to reconcile.
It makes sense from a genetic perspective: Similar how to allocate investment funds (primary funds in safe conservative investments, additional funds in more speculative 'moonshot' investments).
Birth order is real and parenting is not data science.
Remember the easy birth order question? How many pictures of you do your parents have (pr take)? If u r a FB many! Less and less as kids continue
Would like to hear more details to that claim. When ever I read about genetic factors (For example on the topic of depression), I keep hearing that without the environmental factors the genetic indicators loose their predictive power. Genetic factors in behavioral science make a person more effected by environmental factors, but alone the genetic factor tend to have no effect.
To take the explicit example in the article. Is there an measurable effect in adult life that correlate to the amount parents focus and dedicate time to them as child? In rats I have heard enough studies to show a very strong correlation between stress in adult life and time that the rat got groomed as young by the mother. Could it be so simple that parents spend a bit more time/focus with the first child during the first few years, while the second child receive a bit less since there is now two children and the parents are a bit more experienced and feel more secure in parenting. While rats and humans are not identical, it is a strong hint that "parenting style" might carry an effect into adult life.
Source: https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf
Although heritability estimates are significantly greater than 0%, they are also significantly less than 100%. As noted earlier, heritability estimates are substantial between 30% and 50%.... No traits are 100% heritable (e.g., Plomin, 1989; Turkheimer, 2000).
In particular, "all psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic influence" mostly contradicts your comment, also "the heritability of intelligence increases throughout development" - i.e. environmental factors (parenting) matter when kids is young, but less so when they turn into adults.
Finally, we note that 4 of the top 10 findings (Findings 2, 7, 8, and 9) are about environmental influences rather than genetic influences. Via genetically sensitive designs such as twin studies, behavioral genetics has revealed almost as much about the environment as about genetics.
You have to elaborate a bit more if your claim is that this paper disprove environmental influences.
A second key aspect from the abstract:
Most important, heritability does not imply immutability (Plominet al., 2013).
Not at all, but I think it disproves this part:
> but alone the genetic factor tend to have no effect
The idea that genes dictate outcomes in immutable ways is exactly what the authors of this study disagree with.
To make a direct example on the study of a particular gene and depression. If you take a person with this gene, they have (if i recall right) 6 times higher risk factor for depression compared to other people, but only if they also have had a child hood trauma. People with the gene and no such trauma has no higher risk for depression than people without the gene and no trauma. The gene has a environmental aspect to it.
Page 5: For example, a heritability of nearly 100% implies that environmental differences that exist in the population do not have an effect on a particular phenotype assessed at a particular stage in development.
Title: Finding 2. No traits are 100% heritable. Although heritability estimates are significantly greater than 0%, they are also significantly less than 100%. As noted earlier, heritability estimates are substantial between 30% and 50%,
The study is very clear here. Environmental influences are estimated to be between 70% and 50%, and never as low as 0% for any single trait.
Further more on page 6: Many others have noted that no traits are 100% heritable (e.g., Plomin, 1989; Turkheimer, 2000).
My original claim was that alone the genetic factor tend to have no effect, ie, no genetic factor gives 100% heritability for a trait in behavioral science. This study support this claim. I am sorry to say that either you read the study wrong or you misinterpreted my comment.
First, he's taking the results of a voluntary survey of users of his own site. He'd be better off asking a polling firm to randomly contact people, ask if they regularly read any more well-known sites that are more "intellectual" in nature, and then ask about the person's birth order.
Second, he uses anecdotal data about Harvard students, which ignores several potential sources of bias. As one example: Harvard is expensive, and students are more likely to come from families with large incomes. High-income families have fewer children. Another example: younger siblings often specifically don't want to go to the same school as their older siblings, so if an older sibling gets into Harvard, they are less likely to bother applying.
There's also a bit about males being more likely to be gay based on having more older brothers. I could probably spend an hour listing reasons you shouldn't take that research seriously.
Not really, he starts out explaining that most previous research on birth order effects was well and truly debunked. This doesn't disprove the existence of birth order effects, and he makes a decent case.
> First, he's taking the results of a voluntary survey of users of his own site
And he thoroughly discusses the self-selection bias.
> Another example: younger siblings often specifically don't want to go to the same school as their older siblings, so if an older sibling gets into Harvard, they are less likely to bother applying.
If first-borns are more likely to go to Harvard, that's a birth order effect too. If they're not more likely to go to Harvard, then Harvard should have an even mix of birth orders and so aren't subject to the bias you point out.
>It’s unlikely that age alone is driving these results. In sibships of two, older siblings on average were only about one year older than younger siblings.
And I really start thinking you have to check your data. The average age difference in that cohort is only one year and humans have a 9 month gestation. Something is likely wrong with your data or your sample.
> No, the difference between the average age of all older siblings taking the survey, and the average age of all younger siblings taking the survey, was one year.
Check your data. My first gut-instinct on seeing data like that is not "Eureka - i found a huge first-birth-order effect", but rather "huh...looks wrong, I wonder why that is?".
What do I mean "looks wrong"? Keep in mind I have no real "pony in the race" on first-born effects (although I admit I am one), but intuitively it "doesn't look like real social data looks like".
The effect is too big. Its too loud. Its too constant. Its too nice. Something else is driving it and its your job to find out what...
The first place I'd look is data quality. Have you proven your data got into your final histogram data set right? I had problems with your csv opening it in libre office...looks like it interpreted it as having some value migration between the variable in whatever you did. Could be my computer, but in my experience, if there's a problem with the csv, these kind of things correlate with other mistakes.
The second place i'd look is survey design: was there a default option, are people clicking through by default, are the response frequencies of other variables lining up as would be expected (gender, birthdays, that kind of thing). If not, why not?
If you've crossed and ticked all those, only after that would I start the analysis...but again, a pattern and effect of that size and consistency is something that you should default to needing explained in the data. Reach the conclusion that its real only after you've eliminated everything else.
He can't cross-reference by gender very well because his audience is overwhelmingly male, to the point where there's probably not a lot of statistical significance in the female audience.
But yes, I think that these data are very open to an "impossibly hungry judges" critique. If birth order effects were so very visible and so very strong, why haven't we noticed them before?
Pretend there's a business somewhere.
Pretend they implemented a rule that said people had to enter a number/estimate into a box for a certain peice of information before they could proceed to the next box.
Pretend as an analyst you're looking at the values resulting some way down the pipe from that data entry point.
Do you think it reasonable to assume the distribution of numbers entered into that box that were invalid would be uniformally random?
If the answer is no, what numbers do you think people would enter disproportionately?
That said, I still don't believe these data. I don't know where the flaw is, but I none the less think there's a flaw. If it were a much smaller effect, it would be much more believable.
Why do you think that?
We know that the SSC readership is in many ways quite distinct from the general population, so why do you find it surprising that it has correlations with birth order? Is it because you find it surprising that anything has correlations with birth order?
For me the question is, if it is so obvious and measurable, why is this the first study that finds this obvious effect.
The key observation is that I'd expect the same RNG to be used for each of the four fields.
I think you'd see much more `0`s in the fake data as well (it's a Schelling point). But if the fake-data population was disproportionately recorded as only children, that would have reduced the first-child effect, not attenuated it.
I'm not sure where you're from but everyone I know (including a psychologist) sees birth order effects as very real with noticable effect. Have you never seen the stats of first borns being overrepresented in management, for example? Am I misunderstanding what you mean by "haven't noticed them before"?
But more so, the effects in the Slate Star Codex survey are extremely strong. You'd expect that an effect that strong would be part of the common wisdom, not something that has to be teased out in a psychological study.
LMGTFY
Is blank coerced into 0?
That would seem to explain the size of the effect.
In practice, gender is immaculately reported and recorded compared to most other variables.
Both gender and birth days have nice reasonableness bounds and statistical properties that can be transparently reasoned about. Deviation from those nice statistical properties not only confirms for you that something is going on in your data, often the way it can deviate gives hints as to the next thread you should start chasing.
Obviously it's not perfect, not all data problems will show up there, but in practice it's an extremely low hanging fruit on which to get started, and seeing strong deviations from 50/50 statistical gender splits and predictable day/month/year type distributions should start analytical klaxons going off in your demographic noggin...
Sure, if you didn't know that the base rate was skewed, you'd want to check your numbers the first time you made that measurement. But it's well-known (I suppose only by regular readers of SSC) that the SSC community is significantly above the population base rate on a whole host of metrics (self-reported IQ, transgender, % of males, autistic spectrum, etc).
Edit: to clarify which point I was referring to
But regardless, back to gender.
Lots of groups don't have 50/50 splits. But where they don't, it's elementary to discover that they don't. Plus it's a peice of information that is traditionally very accurately recorded: recording mistakes and misreporting compared to other variables in practice is almost traditionally the lowest of any variable amongst most populations of social data.
How much they differ from 50/50, and why they differ is usually a big peice of the analytical puzzle.
Someone else pointed out "well, professional footballers all men". But that's exactly my point, if you were generally interested in discovering things analytically, and you got a set of data sources from professional footballers, you'd discover all men, and quite rightly you'd investigate and find out "yeah, gender plays a real role in professional football". There's actual mechanisms and predictions you'd eventually find.
But in this situation, where you're explaining birth order effects, we need to start hypothesising and looking for tests, falsifiable claims, and mechanisms of operation.
Now, I don't know what mechanism is at work here, but you can bet that an almost 100 make presentation rate amongst a survey that didn't explicitly select for it is highly relevant to the puzzle.
Why is it attracting these people? Are these representative males themselves? Are the females representative? Does the birth order effect only express itself in this community and these makes in these parts of the country/world/industry? What is its suggested mechanism of action that can be stated in a falsifiable way? If it was real, where else would you find it, and given our known distribution of makes in the population, how often and strong might you expect those effects to be?
Randomized double-blind studies
peer reviewed question sets
longitudinal cohorts
The goal is to control for known biases. It’s hard, however, to discern conclusions from a dataset that is already biased. There’s very little in this to conclude effectively that “intellectual curiosity” was caused by birth order. They might be independent variables from each other on this survey born out by another variable. Or are completely spurious in nature.
But it is also possible that while broadly speaking birth order doesn't have any significant effects on things, when you go out to a population as niche as "people who read SSC and like it enough to fill out a form for 15-30 minutes just because Scott asked them too" and you slice the n-dimensional space in question with that much precision, that you will get a very, very particular slice of the world in which there are birth order effects.
This would imply that there are birth order effects, but that in general they are too weak to be picked up by a general-purpose study. However, perhaps if you magnify them in such a precise way you can see them, even though they are small. "Member of the SSC community" is a very information-rich cut of the general population and it would not be a surprise to see that poking out of the stats in many other ways.
Statistics being what they are, I believe it is completely possible for both "Birth order has no significant impact on whether you will show up in SSC's community" and "Given membership within SSC's community, birth order effects can be witnessed" to be simultaneously statistically true. Previous studies showing birth order to not matter would be testing a hypothesis much closer to the first one, Scott is obviously testing the latter.
This is merely a hypothesis that is not very complicated (in Occam's Razor terms, given the fact that "everything sorta correlates to everything" is a basic fact of the world we live in and thus using that does not really count as "multiplying entities") and fits both the facts, but not one I am claiming is certain to be true. A lot more analysis would have to be done, to a degree of rigor I doubt anyone is going to perform since nobody has the full picture and the effort to obtain the full picture is likely larger than the payoff. So let it be clear that I'm just spitballing, and aware of the fact that I'm just spitballing.
As a counterpoint, Scott went the other direction in his post, arguing that the true effect was more general, but the metrics previous academics used was broken, and therefore undersold the strength of the effect they were detecting:
> I think the most likely explanation is that tests for Openness have limited validity, which makes the correlation look smaller than it really is. If being an eldest sibling increases true underlying Openness by a lot, but your score on psychometric tests for Openness only correlates modestly with true underlying Openness, that would look like being an eldest sibling only increasing test-measured-Openness a little bit.
It's simple to falsify this (though it requires some work); just do more experiments on the general population using the metric that Scott likes [1], and see if that detects a stronger birth-order effect.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230787941_Construct...
https://goo.gl/forms/8bmb7dwWyBtS5nDM2
And it is pretty obvious the sample is bias, though take a look to see for yourself and comment if you notice anything too.
Sure, who's claiming otherwise?
Pretty skewed results.
Obviously the SSC readership is a very long way from being an unbiased sample of (say) the whole world's population. No one would expect it to be, and in fact that's the point here: a survey of people who are obviously unusual in some respects (whatever combination of quirks turns someone into a likely SSC reader) turns out to be unusual in another respect with no obvious connection, namely having substantially more firstborn children than you'd expect.
Whatever it is that makes someone more likely to read SSC, it seems like it's probably a combination of things that surely can't correlate with birth order (e.g., being a native English speaker) and, broadly speaking, personality traits (e.g., being interested in the sort of thing Scott writes).
So the results show evidence of a link between birth order and personality, and (from the survey results) apparently a strong one. Which is interesting if true. And all of this only works because the SSC readership is far from typical of the population of a whole.
So, again, what do you mean by "skewed"? And why is it a problem?
Since SAT scores are very highly correlated with IQ test scores, and they are often more available, no, not at all.
I'm much more concerned with how the sample (if it can even be called that) was generated, which kind of makes the whole thing worthless. The pointers to peer-reviewed studies (even though almost certainly cherry-picked) are more useful than the original “research” reported.
That all being said, correlation itself is not a de facto proof nor does it mean it is a good metric. There is a 99.8% correlation (which I'd call "very highly correlated") between US spending on science/space/technology and deaths by strangulation/hanging/suffocation[2]. I think we can all see that it would be laughable to use one as a predictor of the other.
Yeah, this example is ludicrous and obvious, but the difficult part is when you expect things to be dependent (which is what we are seeking for a good metric, not correlation), but aren't. It is easy to find data to match the results you are looking for, but that doesn't mean they are good results.
[1] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/ps/Frey.pdf?origin=...
Take people who have one and only one sibling:
For the studied population (people who chose to take the SSC survey) the % of people who were the older sibling was some number.
The "sample" to compare that to is...what? The human population as a whole? Then we don't need a sample group, we know it has to be 50%.
So if the number he got in his study is much different from 50% that says something about the population in the study being different.
Alternative hypothesis: first-born children wish to escape their siblings so much that they would prefer to leave the species.
It would be interesting to investigate the relationship between the age of the respondent and the effect of birth order. For example, does birth order matter less for millennials than it does for baby boomers, or vice versa?
Also would be interesting to investigate how much the age difference between siblings matter. For example, does birth order matter more if the siblings are born 1 year apart vs 10 years apart?
So you're more likely to encounter a first born in the real world than any nth born, since some families will have only had one child.
First born, middle, baby, only... Quite helpful as how to understand and predict people's actions. And how to communicate with them.
Also, the cases where the first born or first son being expected to behave like a FB but are naturally not...often they dont realize this until adulthood.
The book by Leman (The Birth Order Book) i bought shortly after entering the workforce. A great read.
It mostly deals with debunking common views on parent->child effects, but includes some material on birth order effects.
[1] https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/nurture-assumption
So, uh... People understand that "average difference" is a miserable plan here right?
Regarding birth order, the "middle child" stereotype is prevalent in Western society. Did the middle child stereotype spring from some sort of effort by first-borns to keep their lower-ranked siblings in line (a la racism?)? I doubt it. The middle child stereotype probably came from hundreds of years of observations. It's a similar story for the first-born and last-born stereotypes- they weren't created out of any prejudice, but probably from hundreds of years of mothers chatting about their kids.
Like the article says, denying that the differences exist prevents us from ever finding out why (because people won't do research on something that doesn't exist). So let's acknowledge that some groups of people are different than other groups, and then respectfully do research to figure out why. The differences could be societal- perhaps first-borns are treated with more care by their parents, or they could be biological- perhaps the hormonal changes in a pregnant woman are different for each successive child, or they could be something else entirely- I had many of the same teachers as my older sister, and I often benefited from them having a pleasant experience with her, making my time in class much easier.
But anyway, the first step is acknowleding that a difference exists, and that you aren't somehow "birth order-ist" just because you acknowledge that first-born kids often outscore lower order kids on many metrics.
What is this stereotype though? I don't know about it - or about the others actually, but they were explained in the article.
I never heard anyone explain lack of success of child by saying "because he is second" or success of first as "first tend to be like it". Like, never.
Obviously this doesn't hold true for every family, and I'll acknowledge that this stereotype is may be less prevalent in cultures that tend towards small families (one or two kids).
Also, it's quite possible that in France we talk even less about that, as people "being born equal" is a really important concept here.
I don't think it should be ignored just because there are more hot-button issues that can be fixed- recruiting women and racial minorities into STEM is probably a better bang for your buck than trying to level out a 1 point difference in IQ based on birth order (how would that even happen?). Even though birth order has a low effect size, it would be nice to know why it happens and how much we could do to change it.
And then immediately the second step is acknowledging that these differences are, in most cases, too small to matter, as even Scott Alexander points out when he refers to the existing academic research.
There are few studies of birth order effects just like there are few studies of the effect of birthmarks on human psychology. There's mostly just not enough there for it to be an interesting investigative avenue.
And the whole "few studies exist because it isn't interesting" is the cycle that he's pushing to break out of. Enumerating the differences could make them interesting to psychologists, because then they might be able to determine a cause and intervene. The second to last paragraph of his post explains it more.
Matter for what, exactly? Case in point, there's a distinct physiological difference between me, a guy who has lived at almost sea-level altitude for his entire life (I'm in my late-30s now) and a guy who has lived in La Paz, Bolivia, at 3,000 m altitude: I won't be as able to physically perform at that altitude as he is, and that matters (for example if I were a professional footballer and I wanted to win a match against the Bolivian's guy team most probably I would lose, even if I were Messi, one of the best footballers ever). And I could add countless other differences between different groups of people from all over the world from the sports' world alone. That wouldn't make me a racist because I don't believe in races, but I believe (based on my past observations) that there are indeed differences between the 7 billion humans inhabiting this planet.
The analog here from Scott's article is that he mentions that this skew towards first-borns might be STEM specific. A 1.5 point difference in knowledge based (creative) careers might matter. But most people work in training based (vocational) careers, and a 1.5 point difference might not matter there.
I just said that it matters for sea-level people who have to perform physical tasks in La Paz, a populous city, nonetheless. I gave Messi's example because that was the easiest one, but I could have given an example of a Bolivian guy moving to La Paz from the country's planes area and trying to find a job physically carrying stuff in a warehouse. His rate of work would be much diminished compared to a guy born and raised in La Paz, so, presumably, his pay would also be lower. It matters because it shows that our bodies have changed and are indeed different based on certain geographical circumstances, but because some crazy guys in the late 19th-early 20th century have decided to kill millions of people based on some other differences that means that it has become tabu to discuss about this.
That doesn't make me politically correct, rather it makes me unmotivated to further explore the topic.
Can't leave to make it on his own like the younger siblings but by default don't inherit the family fortunes/business/whatever.
But as in the west we don't live in a society where the oldest inherits his fathers job/title(s) this doesn't really apply anymore.
No, the first step is acquiring sufficient high-quality data and reproducing findings.
> we don't want to talk about it.
No, some want to talk about it prematurely because it speculatively supports conclusions that fit their agenda.
> that you aren't somehow "birth order-ist" just because you acknowledge that first-born kids often outscore lower order kids on many metrics.
And yet here we are, hijacking an interesting if incomplete study for your own purpose and hiding behind "but science" whilst having an incomplete understanding of it.
I agree that good data is a pre-requisite. An online survey of blog readers isn't going to upend psychology as we know it, but Scott's findings of a heavily skewed numbers of first-borns in the survey probably can't be explained as just "online survey crap." The only "online crap" explanation I can think of is if the "first born" box was pre-filled and people changed the response for their number of siblings but didn't change the pre-filled response for birth order. This unbalanced first-born ratio is something that could be looked at in a bigger and more rigorous survey.
> some want to talk about it prematurely because it speculatively supports conclusions that fit their agenda
We have to talk about it otherwise we'll never get any data- I'm not advocating policy decisions based on incomplete research, I'm advocating discussion and follow on research. You can't do research without discussing ideas ahead of time.
> yet here we are, hijacking an interesting if incomplete study for your own purpose
I didn't hijack anything. I was making a comment that stayed on topic and is related to the post.
BTW, I'm a statistician, and have a pretty good understanding behind the science of surveys. I'm admittedly not an expert in psychology. From the HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
In the survey, birth order is inferred from the field that records the number of elder siblings. If the form design nudged respondants to not completing that field more than other fields (via unclear or biasing wording, ordering effects, etc) that could produce a similar outcome.
I haven't looked at the survey so no idea, but there are more potential causes than defaults.
I'm not saying there's no effect, just that right now this claimed finding seems contrary to the existing body of evidence.
This finding may well be accurate (and the existing studies in error). Alternatively it may be a mistake. Alternatively both could be true and this survey represents a special case, some kind of selection bias.
Given that this survey is yet to be peer reviewed or replicated I think the most likely explanation is a mistake, but that's just my perception of the balance of probabilities.
This, this, this, this, this!
People are not created equal at all! That should be obvious to anyone evaluates the world in even a cursory manner. There are material, physical, emotional and intellectual differences between any two individuals.
I have a (totally baseless and unvalidated) theory: If you accept that all people are not equal you are presented with a curious metaphysical problem when considered from a Western "Christian" perspective; why did God create both paupers and princes?--i.e., why are some born into ridiculous wealth and others crippling poverty? Eastern traditions handle this typically by some appeal to "reincarnation" and/or "karma." You can't do this in the Western view because everyone there is living to get into heaven, not escape samsara (it's funny that in some views these are actually the same thing :)
In earlier times when I debated fundamentalists, the retort would be "each is tested in his own way" or something along those lines. How entirely unsatisfying, the game is rigged and we're all not starting from the same position! For the modern, non-secular mind, it seems people would rather maintain the fiction of equality than consider the fact that the world is a profoundly un-equal place.
I'll bite though on the religious bit (I'm a practicing Christian). I think people give unsatisfying answers because a base assumption is that God can do anything. But really, there are things God cannot do, or he would cease to be God...
Add in Christ's atonement making up for all injustices and pains, the ability to choose as paramount our being, and our existence extending beyond both ends of this mortal existence. And then I think we have most of the pieces necessary to construct an answer that's not entirely dissatisfying.
I'm not here to discuss it per-say, just wanted to say that I think most (religious) people build their arguments from some unchecked assumptions that lead to unsatisfactory results.
(As a mostly irrelevant aside - if you've ever read the second MistBorn series, I think the God-like figure in that series touches well on interventions of God)
When I was still a catholic I "solved" this by assuming God put souls with more capability to survive hardships in bodies that experience more hardships. Basically the world is a level-scaling MMORPG :)
When I stopped being a catholic I just assumed there's nothing fair about universe, it's just random, so there's nothing to explain.
The fact we don't have equal chances is obvious, even people saying otherways usually know this deep down, they just won't admit it because ideology, so they might say "people are equal, but society is keeping some of us down" (clearly not the only factor - see psychological development problems), or "people are equally talented at different things, some of us don't get to realize these talents" - which might be true, for general enough definition of talent, but is quite unlikely (if nobody's supervising the distribution of talents - how do you ensure everybody's got the same amount?). And even if it's true - the definition has to be so general that in practice it doesn't matter.
Interestingly, if you an understand the synthesis of eastern metaphysical concepts such as "maya" (illusion), "karma" (causation) and their logical implications such as reincarnation, you arrive at a similar conclusion -- the world is essentially a game (meant to be enjoyed, a journey, a sport to be reveled in), which scales your instance based on your karma! There's respawning too :)
Choose your own adventure!
Just thought I'd drop a book recommendation here: "The Monk and the Philosopher" - Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard [0]. A much younger, atheist, science-absolutionist (?-haha) me had his mind blown by this text. It made me seriously question my world view (which would be later be shattered by a friend with considerable philosophical talent). I do not currently identify as a Buddhist, and I'm not sure how it would be received now, but it certainly was useful in breaking a certain science-dogma in me.
edit: punctuation, book recommendation
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Monk-Philosopher-Father-Discuss-Meani...
> The differences could be societal- perhaps first-borns are treated with more care by their parents, or they could be biological- perhaps the hormonal changes in a pregnant woman are different for each successive child, or they could be something else entirely
No one brought it up directly, but I can't help but think that some of this thread has undertones of the Damore discussion, which drives the argument from:
Societal changes we could make - to - these things (sorta kinda maybe based on pseudoscience) might not be societal and shouldn't be addressed (or at least not in the way they currently are).
I tend to be strongly in the former camp, which it sounds like you could be too. But let's not conflate those two separate conversations.
Race and gender has a profound effect on your prospects, but not in a way we can't fix.
Romans 9 is rather controversial in Christianity these days. A lot of people will tell you it doesn't mean what it seems to be saying. But if you take it on face value, it explicitly acknowledges that the game is rigged. God makes different people to serve his different purposes, and that is the way it is meant to be.
Some clarity around "God's purpose" would be helpful.
To be all-powerful means you have the ability to effect any and all ends that you desire. It means you can realize all your purposes. If one doesn't have any desires (i.e., purposes), I'm not sure it would mean anything to say one is all-powerful.
If you accept that all people are not equal, then you are presented with a number of curious metaphysical problems. The big one is, how do you limit the damage caused by the lessers?
For my brother and me it was the same, except he was really narrowly interested. He left a very bad impression with every sports and arts teacher I had. And with sports and arts there's no hard proof that you're better than the prejudice.
During the hundreds of years of observations, what were social conditions like? What social classes were studied? How did the high rate of infant and maternal mortality affect those conditions? The main change in successive children was that some of them died.
The second-to-last step is deciding what you want to do with this information.
The problem with stereotypes isn't just when they are "hateful" or "inaccurate"; the problem with stereotypes is also when they are used to deny individual variation.
If the survey took place on a gun enthusiast website:
- Fair claim: first borns are more likely to be gun enthusiasts
- Far fetched claim: first borns have stronger personalities
I'm not just assuming it, I'm saying that two analyses showed it was the only trait that mattered, and then it suffices to explain the current data.
I preach cautiousness in the name of finding the objective truth. One should be careful when testing a specific group of people.
I didn’t like the methodology of this study, so I did my own little study, my wife being the core respondent.
The results were astounding and the P value is off the charts (higher is better in this case - trust me).
Conclusion: middle children are the best
* doesn't control whether the not-first-borns are outside the target demographic (too old or too young)
* doesn't look at children without siblings
* more importantly: is just a cross section, so no causal relationships can be gleaned from that
* also highly problematic: is self-selecting, with no discussion of the distribution of people not participating. With a poll question like that that alone invalidates every result, as obviously it invites bias towards readers who deem themselves smarter than their siblings
* is not discussing, and controlling for, alternative explanations for the observed result
All in all the margin of error is almost certainly a multiple of the effect size, thus rendering the results useless. Which they are anyway, because you can only answer a question like the one given in the article with longitudinal studies.
Single points aren't anti-points to statistical effects. Now if you happened to have a thousand friends that where also the youngest of 6 and happened to test higher on IQ scores, that would be weird. For more than one reason.
Or, again, perhaps there is a large part of cultural bias ("eldest/heir" of the family being assumed as better) so given more attention/resources... And that since I'm from a family with a single mother (who didn't have time/inclination for that) I was spared that?
In any case, I think making up "exists and are strong" conclusions without taking into account more parameters is simplistic at best...
Alternatively birth distance (time between births) or age of mother are the actual correlate. We do not know.
First. The word is weird.
Second. No, you would not assume that. Why would you assume that? You could also with equal validity assume that something is present in the mother with the first-born that is absent in all the rest. You could also assume the study is hokum and missed something obvious.
Third. This “Single points aren't anti-points to statistical effects.” is _exactly_ why it isn't weird. Even supposing there is some statistically distributed effect you as a single point is a total non-issue. You are not special. Do get back to me if you've three heads or something.
Fourth. To think it is weird suggests you are in fact not as smart as you think you are. :)
Fifth. To continue arguing the point when it has been explained to you why you are wrong is again indicative of not being as smart as you think you are. :) :)
Second. Oops, no seconds here, First is usually enough for me to lose interest in said people.
My older brother was as smart as a box of rocks. Even given that, he was an under achiever. He would couch surf and mooch off anyone. He would work a job until the first pay check then quit. If there was ever a reason to be against UBI, he was it. I would tell my mom he's like that first pancake that just doesn't turn out right because you rushed.
I, on the other hand, became an engineer.