7. I plan to confirm or disprove, once and for all,
whether our community has more older siblings. For lack
of a fancier way to do this, I’ll take the set of all
people who have exactly one sibling, and see what
percent of them are older vs. younger. If it’s
significantly above 50% older, I’m going to interpret
this as a birth order effect. I’ll do the same with the
set of people who have two siblings, three siblings,
etc, and combine them all for a final determination.
Half-siblings will be ignored. If you have any problems
with this methodology, tell me now.
I'd have preferred if Scott posted an encrypted timestamped message on Pastebin before the survey (to register his intended experiments), and released the keys after the survey; "this could skew your results please don't read" is not particularly well controlled.
The prevalence of older siblings could be because of other reasons perhaps? Only people born with a certain period of time are likely to be interested in transhumanism and of those more are older siblings than otherwise.
He explained that, too. The average age of all the older siblings that responded and the the average age of all the younger siblings that responded were within 1 year.