Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong

Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by searealist on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @04:53AM (#16104858)

It's pretty likely that first born children were more likely to respond to the survey given that Scott openly stated he expected more first born children to be among his readership, giving people an impression that first born is better and they might feel good about themselves vs second born children who might feel bad about themselves.

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by Yvain on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @04:59AM (#16104882)

I don't remember mentioning that prominently before the survey. Can you link me to the relevant quote?

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by searealist on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @05:06AM (#16104909)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/25/preregistration-of-hyp...

    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.

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by Yvain on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @05:15AM (#16104954)

That post starts with "Please don’t read on until you’ve taken it, since this could bias your results."

But I checked the data I received before and after I posted that, and the birth order effects are about equally strong throughout.

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by theptip on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @09:55AM (#16106539)

I'd have preferred if Scott posted an encrypted timestamped message on Pastebin before the survey (to register his intended experiments), and released the keys after the survey; "this could skew your results please don't read" is not particularly well controlled.

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by wging on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @11:09AM (#16107153)

You don't really need to encrypt - just one-way hash. (Though if you count that as 'encryption' for this purpose, okay.)

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by darepublic on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @05:24AM (#16104999)

The prevalence of older siblings could be because of other reasons perhaps? Only people born with a certain period of time are likely to be interested in transhumanism and of those more are older siblings than otherwise.

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by losvedir on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @10:41AM (#16106934)

He explained that, too. The average age of all the older siblings that responded and the the average age of all the younger siblings that responded were within 1 year.

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by AstralStorm on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @05:58AM (#16105135)

The drawback of any survey driven study, right?

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by searealist on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @05:18AM (#16104969)

And what % was before and what % after ?

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by Yvain on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @05:30AM (#16105024)

5,523 before December 25, when I posted the pre-registrations. 2,254 after.

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.

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by itronitron on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @08:18AM (#16105912)

it may also reflect that firstborns just have more of an interest in birth order effects so were more likely to respond

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by ema on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @05:32AM (#16105028)

I find it highly unlikely that this could produce an effect this big. If anything I would expect the effect to be in the opposite direction motivated by defiance. (though then I am a second born who did respond to the survey (without giving any thought to my birth order))

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Re:Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong by tomp on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @06:11AM (#16105209)

You could equally propose that non-first-born children are more likely to respond to overthrow Scott's hypothesis (since he's pretty open to and reasonable about counterarguments)

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