Yesterday 3 buddies and I ran the birth-order poll (in age order, separated by 5-10 years: @vegan, me, @gravity_levity, @visakanv) all of us are finding first-born over last-born dominance so far. Moderate for @vegan, strong for the rest of us.
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And here’s Visa’s, late 20s (?) marketer in Singaporehttps://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1093404506857979905?s=20 …
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The tech cycles explanation is not entirely convincing. Scott Alexander of
@slatestarcodex also found the effect, he’s a psychologist/rationalist community blogger and polled people at meetups etc, not twitterhttps://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/08/fight-me-psychologists-birth-order-effects-exist-and-are-very-strong/?fbclid=IwAR0nMcOQeBiOzSNFIDCSeRzOBX5vpwADfLF50GmpxkWOL-wb_CZGDUL9m1k …Show this thread -
Scott thinks it might be due to STEM effects...older siblings more likely to go into STEM fields. If so, it might also contribute to twitter case. STEMmies being overrepresented here in general and probably specifically for 2 of 4 of us (Brian and me)
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I do know indirectly via other polls that my followers are strongly STEM biased. So if that’s part of the explanation, it would apply at least in my case.pic.twitter.com/QMhXldb5tZ
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Note: the bigger the sibling-set, the stronger the left-tail clipping effect. If you have many siblings, like Brian, gap between oldest and youngest will be bigger. If you are oldest/middle and joined Twitter at ~22, almost no chance that 5+ years younger sibling will be here.
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And finally, to the extent twitter attracts a “type” independent of age, even in steady state there’s going to be tail clipping. If you’re 20 and joined today, older sibling is probably also on here, but younger one likely will not join. So it’s not a 1-time early adopter effect
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A reasonable null hypothesis is that there's no birth-order effect, and it's all artifact of tech cycles.
@tomguarriello pointed me to Judith Harris' Nurture Assumption as key ref here. I haven't read it. Just noting it here in case anyone wants to dig. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption …Show this thread -
Of course, gotta also note usual caveats: absence of evidence is not evidence of evidence, can't prove a negative, replication crisis in social psych etc., but the unfoundedness of several specific birth-order effect hypotheses does call the general idea into question as well.
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Above my statistics pay grade, but clearly if you do a convolution of a moving unstable distribution like a series of intersecting adoption curves spaced 2-5 years apart, with a symmetric one like birth order, you should get an asymmetric result.
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End of conversation
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Brian picked up a lot of followers when he noticed that some scientists were breaking the rules. (First-borns are stereotyped as being rule followers.)
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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