I curated this post for these reasons (starting with the most important):
This post is a central example of the sort of intellectual labour that many people can do, is actually useful, and that I’d love to see people doing more on LessWrong. Taking on a nearby operationalisation of the question (great mathematicians), spending 20 hours gathering + analysing data, and open-sourcing it all, really helps shine a light on an empirical question like this.
The post is surprisingly clearly written. It uses an academic structure (intro, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion) yet doesn’t add needless complexity, and is short. I enjoyed reading it.
It adds to prior work done by a member of the broader rationality community. I might have thought there’d just been some weird mistake with LW/SSC community data, but having it for this independent group is starting to become a much stronger argument.
Thoughts on further work:
As the OP says, seeing some more replication attempts on other populations (e.g. less famous mathematicians, but also vastly different parts of society) would be interesting.
Some people developing first-principles models that predict this effect (e.g. models of biology/chemistry in the womb, models of socialising effects of siblings), that make other testable predictions we can explore, would also be great to see (as the OP points to in the conclusion).
If people think of strong reasons why this dataset (or the earlier LW/SSC ones) are biased, that would also be a big help.
Overall, this is a great replication work. Please do more of this!
I curated this post for these reasons (starting with the most important):
This post is a central example of the sort of intellectual labour that many people can do, is actually useful, and that I’d love to see people doing more on LessWrong. Taking on a nearby operationalisation of the question (great mathematicians), spending 20 hours gathering + analysing data, and open-sourcing it all, really helps shine a light on an empirical question like this.
The post is surprisingly clearly written. It uses an academic structure (intro, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion) yet doesn’t add needless complexity, and is short. I enjoyed reading it.
It adds to prior work done by a member of the broader rationality community. I might have thought there’d just been some weird mistake with LW/SSC community data, but having it for this independent group is starting to become a much stronger argument.
Thoughts on further work:
As the OP says, seeing some more replication attempts on other populations (e.g. less famous mathematicians, but also vastly different parts of society) would be interesting.
Some people developing first-principles models that predict this effect (e.g. models of biology/chemistry in the womb, models of socialising effects of siblings), that make other testable predictions we can explore, would also be great to see (as the OP points to in the conclusion).
If people think of strong reasons why this dataset (or the earlier LW/SSC ones) are biased, that would also be a big help.
Overall, this is a great replication work. Please do more of this!