If you could on the children of engineers/scientists thing, that’d be interesting. I don’t know how useful it’d be because I imagine it’d boil down to them being much nerdier than the children of equivalently intelligent groups, such as lawyers, Arts professors or journalists.
This would make a staggeringly excellent paper/thesis and if one were really ambitious one could also include accountants and teachers, who could be further divided by subject.
The easiest way for a current student to do this would be to try and get data on the adult children of all permanent tenured staff at their university.
I know. That’s what I was trying to avoid doing. But you could take it up. ;)
Your other ideas sound interesting too. But more in the “good subject for a PhD thesis” than good subject for a post. That would be a lot of work to acquire the data, analyse it suitably and write up all the various implications. Come to think of it it would be in the top 10 broad research areas that I’d be interested in following up. (And I would perhaps even have an ethical obligation to follow that research up with a covert ‘evil mastermind’ type eugenics program.)
For my part I am not sure how confident I could be of differences between, say, lawyer’s children and engineer’s children, after controlling for intelligence. Probably some but it’d take a whole lot of data to find significance. Journalists? Who knows. They could even be more susceptible to rationality than engineers for all I know. Potentially contrarian truth seeking is not out of place in a journalist.
I’m more comfortable with making estimates based on the groups that imply serious differences in personality. For example, marketers, ‘Desperate Housewives’ type socialites and human resources middle managers, all after controlling for IQ. Certain kinds of biased thinking are a competitive advantage in those environments.
This has the makings of an excellent post.
If you could on the children of engineers/scientists thing, that’d be interesting. I don’t know how useful it’d be because I imagine it’d boil down to them being much nerdier than the children of equivalently intelligent groups, such as lawyers, Arts professors or journalists.
This would make a staggeringly excellent paper/thesis and if one were really ambitious one could also include accountants and teachers, who could be further divided by subject.
The easiest way for a current student to do this would be to try and get data on the adult children of all permanent tenured staff at their university.
I know. That’s what I was trying to avoid doing. But you could take it up. ;)
Your other ideas sound interesting too. But more in the “good subject for a PhD thesis” than good subject for a post. That would be a lot of work to acquire the data, analyse it suitably and write up all the various implications. Come to think of it it would be in the top 10 broad research areas that I’d be interested in following up. (And I would perhaps even have an ethical obligation to follow that research up with a covert ‘evil mastermind’ type eugenics program.)
For my part I am not sure how confident I could be of differences between, say, lawyer’s children and engineer’s children, after controlling for intelligence. Probably some but it’d take a whole lot of data to find significance. Journalists? Who knows. They could even be more susceptible to rationality than engineers for all I know. Potentially contrarian truth seeking is not out of place in a journalist.
I’m more comfortable with making estimates based on the groups that imply serious differences in personality. For example, marketers, ‘Desperate Housewives’ type socialites and human resources middle managers, all after controlling for IQ. Certain kinds of biased thinking are a competitive advantage in those environments.