Some criticisms of the rebuttal are good. Some are not: >The method for arriving at these “adjusted” (for race, education, etc) percentages is not given. Ther

Some criticisms of the rebuttal are good. Some are not: >The method for arriving at these “adjusted” (for race, education, etc) percentages is not given. There is a pretty standard way of doing this: you stratify the sample, then re-weight the subcategories according to their distribution in the population. For example, if your sample had 10% Black people and 15% Hispanic, you would re-weight to 12% and 18%. There are valid criticisms, and then there is objecting for the sake of objecting. Meanwhile, the original study has its own share of eye-spinners: >Many in Generation YOLO (you only live once) believe that what happens while you’re young won’t affect your future. Generation "YOLO" drinks less as teenagers than any generation before them since Prohibition. Generation "YOLO" has less sex in high school. >There are two other related premarital risk factors for low marital quality in our research sample: Having lived with someone other than a future spouse and/or having been married previously. The effect shown in the figure is very small. As a rule of thumb, the smaller an effect is, the more likely it can be caused by hidden variables. Smoking causing a 1600% increase in lung cancer rates was probably not hidden variables. A 20% increase in the frequency of "high-quality" marriages could be caused by almost anything. Following the same logic, there are a few inferences drawn in the study that are likely to be robust: among college-educated adults (but not non-college adults), those who had a child together before marriage were fifteen times less likely to report high marriage quality (Figure 5). Even if we object to the way data were collected and binned, it's hard to put this rabbit back in the hat: it probably means something, even if it isn't causal. The major weakness of the project is its grandiosity: its assertion that it has identified all sorts of lifestyle factors that can probably lead to a high-quality marriage, and that it can somehow serve as important life advice on these grounds. This drives an excessive optimism about conclusions that, mostly, should be checked again several times before being accepted.