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This could very well just be from the small numbers in the survey and group. In 2016, 1,920,718 people graduated with a BA in the USA. Of those 9,800 were theo
by danielvf 8y ago
This could very well just be from the small numbers in the survey and group.
In 2016, 1,920,718 people graduated with a BA in the USA. Of those 9,800 were theology majors. The survey data used only covered roughly 26,000 people, which would give us an expected 131 theology majors. 31% of those, or forty, married each other, giving us only twenty surveyed theology-theology marriages over an eight year period.
And there were even fewer Architecture graduates and marriages.
- JadeNB 8y agoSeveral of the current top comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941307) explain why this makes sense. I very much appreciate the parent's explanation of why, however sensible it is, one might be sceptical of this result. From my perspective, the point is that it's often very easy to come up with a post hoc explanation of why the effect you see is the one you would have expected; and, had the numbers come out the other way, there probably would have been just as many people who could explain why that was the expected outcome. The power of statistics is that it abstracts away from what should be or what we'd expect to what is, whether it is intuitive or non-. The price paid for this power is that it's very easy to ask questions that seem reasonable but aren't, so that one gets an answer to a precisely defined, rigorous question but misinterprets it as an answer to a possibly ill defined, less rigorous question; and that, to me, is what the parent comment is forcing us to remember.