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Comment by alien_at_work | Hacker News Reader

>If birth order effects were so very visible and so very strong, why haven't we noticed them before?

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"?

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As the article mentions in like the first couple of paragraphs, those results haven't generally withstood replication.

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.

Well, to what you just mentioned, it -seems- to be a "common wisdom" that is disregarded by scientific study. So, maybe this is a case where the study was ill-designed, but everyone took it for granted?

I don't think it is common wisdom. Like, look: which of your coworkers are first-born? How many of them did you intuit that without explicitly asking?

That depends on the field. The guesses can be very accurate based on ancillary data like profession.

Another example, having older brothers is one of the most consistent correlations with homosexuality for males. Birth order effects are absolutely visible.

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