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Do jobs run in families?

research.facebook.com

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Re: Do jobs run in families?

#11

Post by jacquesm »

danharaj wrote: post #10
jacquesm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're prepared to toss ethics overboard it's not that hard to come up with significant, relevant and valid results. The whole trick is to get those results while acting ethical.

I think there's another issue that being willing to be completely unethical requires such distorted thinking (for humans, anyway) that it introduces its own sort of spurious results. Just thinking about a lot of callous and inhumane psychobabble that was promulgated not too long ago, mostly dealing with people whom the researchers thought of as not-quite-as-human.

Indeed, that's another risk. But for now FB seems to have steered clear from research in that vein. Even so I can't read about FB conducting 'studies' without thinking of this:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-unethical-untrustworth...

And like in that study (which went so far as to actively mess with the subjects emotional states) I miss the 'consent' element.

Re: Do jobs run in families?

#12

Post by smt88 »

wbillingsley wrote: post #6

A little uncomfortable that a company that spends $10m lobbying the government in its interests, is also now doing social policy research using their near-monopoly on a particular sort of people's data. (This one, for instance, ties into social mobility which is always an argument that has currency with politicians.) Quite what they're arguing for behind the scenes is unknown ... but then that's part of the problem.

There's no "policy" to this research

Re: Do jobs run in families?

#13

Post by jonathankoren »

jacquesm wrote: post #7
devishard wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're saying here; Facebook does more research than some universities. Their propensity for experimenting on their users is well-documented, and while I disagree with their ethics, they do produce significant, relevant and valid results.

If you're prepared to toss ethics overboard it's not that hard to come up with significant, relevant and valid results. The whole trick is to get those results while acting ethical.

Where's the ethical concern here? Familial relationships can be explicitly provided as can occupation. If it's all self-reported data then what's the problem?

The problem with the emotion manipulation study was that they were effecting people's psychology, not just click behavior. Which is creepy, especially because it apparently worked.

Re: Do jobs run in families?

#17

Post by aab0 »

stygiansonic wrote: post #2

This data is pretty interesting. Of course, it's hard to separate out or even infer the causes as nature vs. nurture (which the article is careful about) but the part about twins was the most striking for me: " Twins' tendency to choose the same occupation, at 24.7%, is even more striking. " A possible explanation was provided above: " Whether identical or fraternal 2, twins are also more likely to be raised in a sim…

> Of course, it's hard to separate out or even infer the causes as nature vs. nurture (which the article is careful about) but the part about twins was the most striking for me:

If you look, they already give you enough to get an idea of the relative contributions:

> 15% of siblings share an occupation, which is higher than the 8.6% rate for any two same-gender, same-age individuals in the population. Twins' tendency to choose the same occupation, at 24.7%, is even more striking.

So siblings have twice the rate of random people, and identical twins have twice the rate of siblings. Since twins have twice the genetics as well, this points to high heritability and (probably) lower shared environment.

Re: Do jobs run in families?

#18

Post by 3pt14159 »

stygiansonic wrote: post #2

This data is pretty interesting. Of course, it's hard to separate out or even infer the causes as nature vs. nurture (which the article is careful about) but the part about twins was the most striking for me: " Twins' tendency to choose the same occupation, at 24.7%, is even more striking. " A possible explanation was provided above: " Whether identical or fraternal 2, twins are also more likely to be raised in a sim…

There are twins separated at births studies that show _striking_ similarities between identical twins. Even when twins are brought up in different environments (income, ethnicity) their choices, intelligence, and divorce rates have a higher r^2 than non-twin siblings brought up within the same household.

Re: Do jobs run in families?

#20

Post by jseliger »

This certainly makes sense: "To conclude, we see that people within a family are proportionally more likely to eventually also choose the same occupation." Still, I wonder if it has become less common with time: the idea of a parent (usually a father) passing the family trade on to the child isn't culturally common, as it used to be during the guild era that got started in the Middle Ages.

On an anecdotal level, I got started as a grant writing consultant because my parents started the business when I was a kid (I wrote a little more about that here: http://seliger.com/about/). But while I became interested i the business as a teenager, neither of my siblings did, and they both work in unrelated fields.

I also feel like I've met a disproportionate number of doctors whose parents were doctors. It does seem like they'd pick up a fair amount of useful information just listening to their parents talk.

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