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Is it just me or is the data presentation completely terrible
A profession by profession table with the raw numbers would be more useful. Perhaps a Hinton Diagram would be a better visualization.
Is it just me or is the data presentation completely terrible
I thought the data visualization was pretty good. How would you improve it? A profession by profession table with the raw numbers would be more useful. Perhaps a Hinton Diagram would be a better visualization.
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…
Twins, even those that grow up separately, are remarkably similar.
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.
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.
Here is a nice example of a sample consent form the kind of which one would expect to fill out before having one's data be used for any kind of study:
https://www.irb.cornell.edu/forms/sample.htm
Not being informed about the fact that your data is going to be used in a study, that the results of that study are going to be published is un-ethical in several ways, for one it presumes consent where non exists, for another it is a breach of the law (because it violates the original purpose of collection). Not that Facebook would care about any of the above but companies and institutions that play by the rules would require the researcher conducting this study to obtain consent from the subjects.
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 go…
It doesn't mean the trade will be passed down as is, but if a kid seems predisposed for a field, the parent with expertise will help it grow further as long as the kid enjoys it.
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.
I wrote a proof of concept on it last year too: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/social-apis-for-social-evil
Good to see this proven out with data; but I'd consider this a pretty intuitive conclusion.
That said, my Dad worked in computing - not as a coder, just as a manager, but it meant that we had an early proto-PC, a 2,400 baud modem and a CompuServe connection. It was probably inevitable that I would end up doing something with computers...