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by usrusr
3129 days ago
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But wouldn't that make it less likely? The first programmers had zero chance of being in the same field as their parents. The numbers are supposed to based on the child generation. If the numbers were based on the parent generation ("likelihood of passing down job preference") then a growing field should indeed increase the likelihood. |
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If we denote the event "Child is a programmer" by C and the event "A parent is a programmer." by P, then the sentence "Computer programmers have parents who are computer programmers at a rate 6 times the rest of the population." can be expressed in terms of probability as P(P|C)/P(P) = 6. Bayes' rule tells us that P(P|C) = P(C|P)P(P)/P(C), so the sentence is equivalent to P(C|P)/P(C) or "Parents who are computer programmers have children who are computer programmers at a rate 6 times the rest of the population."
It doesn't matter whether you are looking at the child generation or the parent generation, the heritability relative to the general population will come out to the same number. A growing field may increase the P(C|P) part of the ratio, but it will also increase P(C) in general, so it is not clear whether the relative measurement will change at all, and in which direction.