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Sure they exist, but we don't want to talk about it. There is a strong motivation to be able to say that everyone is created equal, regardless of how uncontrol

Sure they exist, but we don't want to talk about it. There is a strong motivation to be able to say that everyone is created equal, regardless of how uncontrollable factors affect you (birth order, height, race, gender). We don't want to kill someone's motivation to study for college just because they are a third child. But stereotypes exist for a reason. The hard part is separating hatred-based stereotypes from the stereotypes based on observations throughout history. 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.

seszett 9y ago
> Regarding birth order, the "middle child" stereotype is prevalent in Western society What is this stereotype though? I don't know about it - or about the others actually, but they were explained in the article.
- watwut 9y ago
  I haven't heard about such prevalent stereotypes either. Stereotypes about women I did heard or stereotypes about races. 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.
- olympus 9y ago
  The middle child stereotype is that middle children receive less attention than both their older and younger siblings, resulting in them underperforming in several metrics. In three child families, the "best" child is first-born, the middle child gets ignored, and the third-born gets pampered. 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).
  - seszett 9y ago
    I see. I'm a single child though so there's little reason that I would have heard about that, but it does make sense. 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.
  - SolaceQuantum 9y ago
    Funnily enough in our family the youngest child is the best performing (so far, he’s still a teenager) follow d by the middle sibling, and then the eldest sibling is dead last in terms of performance in life in general.
  - jschwartzi 9y ago
    My experience as the youngest child is that neither of my parents wanted to repeat the "mistake" they made giving my brother resources and supporting him. So where my brother generally got things like cars and a college education, I got things like jobs and student loans.
- Joeboy 9y ago
  I'm dimly aware of the stereotypes, but I'm extremely surprised at how much of a political, hot-button issue it seems to be here.
  - olympus 9y ago
    It's not actually a hot-button issue, at least not on the level of gender and race stereotyping. Claiming a difference based on birth order is more likely to elicit a "you're behind the times" type of response rather than a "you're a horrible person" type of response if you claimed a gender or race based difference. 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.
stdbrouw 9y ago
> But anyway, the first step is acknowledging that a difference exists 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.
- olympus 9y ago
  Previous researchers said "too small to matter," Scott's sentiments were more along the line of "small, but might matter in some areas." His sentence directly after him acknowledging the small effects: "I agree they may only exist for a few traits, but they can be strong enough to skew ratios in some heavily-selected communities like this one." 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.
- paganel 9y ago
  > too small to matter, 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.
  - olympus 9y ago
    In your example, the difference between the high altitude person and you would be too small to matter if you weren't a mountain climbers or professional athlete. So for most people altitude differences are to small to matter but they do matter to certain subgroups. 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.
doikor 9y ago
I think the "middle child" (second oldest) comes form the fact that he should be ready to take over the duties of the oldest if he dies but must not grow to be "better" then the oldest. 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.
craigsmansion 9y ago
> the first step is acknowleding that a difference exists 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.
- backpropaganda 9y ago
  Do you realize that your counterargument can be used pretty much as-is to deny climate change? If your argument is so abstract that it can be applied on anything, perhaps it's not a very usefule argument.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Climate change has high-quality data and reproducible findings backing it up.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - owlmirror 9y ago
      So do a lot of differences between demographic groups. We have a lot of data on the inequality of groups, still we act as if we were equal.
- olympus 9y ago
  > the first step is acquiring sufficient high-quality data and reproducing findings 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."
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
> "Sure they exist, but we don't want to talk about it...the first step is acknowledging that a difference exists" Reminds me of the suppressed discussion about males having a slight preference towards things while females having a slight preference towards people which caused so much of a stir at Google.
- to3m 9y ago
  Suppressed? If only! It was all over the news, we didn't hear the end of it for several weeks, and it still crops up every now and again.
  - cabalamat 9y ago
    It was suppressed within Google.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    It was all over the news as a result of Google trying to suppress the viewpoint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
nsomaru 9y ago
> There is a strong motivation to be able to say that everyone is created equal, regardless of how uncontrollable factors affect you... 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.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I.e. yet another place, where the just-world fallacy sneaked in.
- swsieber 9y ago
  Yeah, the world is incredibly unequal. I do think it's generally not explained well (or even understood well), and for most, they either ignore it, or acknowledge it and consciously set it to one side until it clicks. 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)
carlmr 9y ago
>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. 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.
analog31 9y ago
What do we actually know about the history of the "birth order" stereotype? It's possible that birth order is an old tradition, or maybe it was introduced in modern times, e.g., in some magazine article. 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.
mcguire 9y ago
"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." The second-to-last step is deciding what you want to do with this information.
saalweachter 9y ago
> But stereotypes exist for a reason. The hard part is separating hatred-based stereotypes from the stereotypes based on observations throughout history. 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.

seszett 9y ago

> Regarding birth order, the "middle child" stereotype is prevalent in Western society What is this stereotype though? I don't know about it - or about the others actually, but they were explained in the article.

watwut 9y ago
I haven't heard about such prevalent stereotypes either. Stereotypes about women I did heard or stereotypes about races. 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.
olympus 9y ago
The middle child stereotype is that middle children receive less attention than both their older and younger siblings, resulting in them underperforming in several metrics. In three child families, the "best" child is first-born, the middle child gets ignored, and the third-born gets pampered. 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).
- seszett 9y ago
  I see. I'm a single child though so there's little reason that I would have heard about that, but it does make sense. 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.
- SolaceQuantum 9y ago
  Funnily enough in our family the youngest child is the best performing (so far, he’s still a teenager) follow d by the middle sibling, and then the eldest sibling is dead last in terms of performance in life in general.
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  My experience as the youngest child is that neither of my parents wanted to repeat the "mistake" they made giving my brother resources and supporting him. So where my brother generally got things like cars and a college education, I got things like jobs and student loans.
Joeboy 9y ago
I'm dimly aware of the stereotypes, but I'm extremely surprised at how much of a political, hot-button issue it seems to be here.
- olympus 9y ago
  It's not actually a hot-button issue, at least not on the level of gender and race stereotyping. Claiming a difference based on birth order is more likely to elicit a "you're behind the times" type of response rather than a "you're a horrible person" type of response if you claimed a gender or race based difference. 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.

stdbrouw 9y ago

> But anyway, the first step is acknowledging that a difference exists 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.

olympus 9y ago
Previous researchers said "too small to matter," Scott's sentiments were more along the line of "small, but might matter in some areas." His sentence directly after him acknowledging the small effects: "I agree they may only exist for a few traits, but they can be strong enough to skew ratios in some heavily-selected communities like this one." 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.
paganel 9y ago
> too small to matter, 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.
- olympus 9y ago
  In your example, the difference between the high altitude person and you would be too small to matter if you weren't a mountain climbers or professional athlete. So for most people altitude differences are to small to matter but they do matter to certain subgroups. 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.

doikor 9y ago

I think the "middle child" (second oldest) comes form the fact that he should be ready to take over the duties of the oldest if he dies but must not grow to be "better" then the oldest. 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.

craigsmansion 9y ago

> the first step is acknowleding that a difference exists 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.

backpropaganda 9y ago
Do you realize that your counterargument can be used pretty much as-is to deny climate change? If your argument is so abstract that it can be applied on anything, perhaps it's not a very usefule argument.
- yorwba 9y ago
  Climate change has high-quality data and reproducible findings backing it up.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - owlmirror 9y ago
    So do a lot of differences between demographic groups. We have a lot of data on the inequality of groups, still we act as if we were equal.
olympus 9y ago
> the first step is acquiring sufficient high-quality data and reproducing findings 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."

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

> "Sure they exist, but we don't want to talk about it...the first step is acknowledging that a difference exists" Reminds me of the suppressed discussion about males having a slight preference towards things while females having a slight preference towards people which caused so much of a stir at Google.

to3m 9y ago
Suppressed? If only! It was all over the news, we didn't hear the end of it for several weeks, and it still crops up every now and again.
- cabalamat 9y ago
  It was suppressed within Google.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  It was all over the news as a result of Google trying to suppress the viewpoint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

nsomaru 9y ago

> There is a strong motivation to be able to say that everyone is created equal, regardless of how uncontrollable factors affect you... 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.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
I.e. yet another place, where the just-world fallacy sneaked in.
swsieber 9y ago
Yeah, the world is incredibly unequal. I do think it's generally not explained well (or even understood well), and for most, they either ignore it, or acknowledge it and consciously set it to one side until it clicks. 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)

carlmr 9y ago

>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. 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.

analog31 9y ago

What do we actually know about the history of the "birth order" stereotype? It's possible that birth order is an old tradition, or maybe it was introduced in modern times, e.g., in some magazine article. 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.

mcguire 9y ago

"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." The second-to-last step is deciding what you want to do with this information.

saalweachter 9y ago

> But stereotypes exist for a reason. The hard part is separating hatred-based stereotypes from the stereotypes based on observations throughout history. 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.