It’s a reasonable question. I take the observation to be that 60% of EAs over 45 have married, where we’d expect 85%.
I think a good hypothesis is religion. In general, 60% of atheists have married, versus 80% of the religiously-affiliated have, and ~55% of that effect persists after controlling for age (see the bottom two tables). 86% of EAs are non-religious. So almost half of the reason that EAs marry less is probably just that they’re atheist/agnostic, so they don’t think that cohabiting is living in sin!
The other half, well, I agree with your top two points—that EAs favour work over having kids. Apart from that, two guesses would be:
statistical artifact: that single people are more likely to spend time online, in the kinds of places they would discover the survey.
that single people are more likely to sign up to join a community (to try and meet someone).
Given all the available explanations, I don’t feel that surprised about the observation anymore.
I take the observation to be that 60% of EAs over 45 have married, where we’d expect 85%.
FWIW, and without speaking for Jeff, for Denise and I the original observation was something like ‘percentage of people in nesting relationships around our age range (25-30) anecdotally seems sharply different in our EA versus similar-demographic non-EA circles’.
I consider religion a weak explanation for that, since we’re definitely counting cohabiting couples, but the observation is also less well-founded and I’m far from confident that it generalises across the community well.
I moderately think this is the wrong approach on the meta-level.
1. We observe a phenomenon where X demographic is less likely to exhibit Y characteristic.
2. You’re coming up with a list of explanations (E1, E2, E3) to explain why X is less likely to have Y, and then stopping when the variance is sufficiently explained.
3. However this ignores that there might be reasons for why your prior should be does X is more likely to have Y.
And on the object level, I agree with the other commentators that EAs often draw from groups that are less, rather than more, likely to be single.
I agree that you should look at the things in order of the size of their prediction about the observation. But I think that a lot of the biggest effects would be in that direction.
It’s a reasonable question. I take the observation to be that 60% of EAs over 45 have married, where we’d expect 85%.
I think a good hypothesis is religion. In general, 60% of atheists have married, versus 80% of the religiously-affiliated have, and ~55% of that effect persists after controlling for age (see the bottom two tables). 86% of EAs are non-religious. So almost half of the reason that EAs marry less is probably just that they’re atheist/agnostic, so they don’t think that cohabiting is living in sin!
The other half, well, I agree with your top two points—that EAs favour work over having kids. Apart from that, two guesses would be:
statistical artifact: that single people are more likely to spend time online, in the kinds of places they would discover the survey.
that single people are more likely to sign up to join a community (to try and meet someone).
Given all the available explanations, I don’t feel that surprised about the observation anymore.
FWIW, and without speaking for Jeff, for Denise and I the original observation was something like ‘percentage of people in nesting relationships around our age range (25-30) anecdotally seems sharply different in our EA versus similar-demographic non-EA circles’.
I consider religion a weak explanation for that, since we’re definitely counting cohabiting couples, but the observation is also less well-founded and I’m far from confident that it generalises across the community well.
I moderately think this is the wrong approach on the meta-level.
1. We observe a phenomenon where X demographic is less likely to exhibit Y characteristic.
2. You’re coming up with a list of explanations (E1, E2, E3) to explain why X is less likely to have Y, and then stopping when the variance is sufficiently explained.
3. However this ignores that there might be reasons for why your prior should be does X is more likely to have Y.
And on the object level, I agree with the other commentators that EAs often draw from groups that are less, rather than more, likely to be single.
I agree that you should look at the things in order of the size of their prediction about the observation. But I think that a lot of the biggest effects would be in that direction.