
Do jobs run in families? - ironmantra
https://research.facebook.com/blog/do-jobs-run-in-families-/
======
stygiansonic
This data is pretty interesting. Of course, it's hard to separate out or even
infer the causes as nature vs. nurture (which the article is careful about)
but the part about twins was the most striking for me:

" _Twins ' tendency to choose the same occupation, at 24.7%, is even more
striking._"

A possible explanation was provided above:

" _Whether identical or fraternal 2, twins are also more likely to be raised
in a similar environment — parenting styles may differ as a parents add more
children to their brood, but twins will likely be exposed to a similar
parenting style._ "

Also, being raised in the same time period would also expose you to the same
cultural/economic/societal factors - all of which can change with time, and
also may affect your choice of career. (i.e. the proportion of math_CS parents
could be different from the proportion of math_CS children just because of the
different time periods in which each grew up)

~~~
3pt14159
There are twins separated at births studies that show _striking_ similarities
between identical twins. Even when twins are brought up in different
environments (income, ethnicity) their choices, intelligence, and divorce
rates have a higher r^2 than non-twin siblings brought up within the same
household.

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wbillingsley
A little uncomfortable that a company that spends $10m lobbying the government
in its interests, is also now doing social policy research using their near-
monopoly on a particular sort of people's data. (This one, for instance, ties
into social mobility which is always an argument that has currency with
politicians.) Quite what they're arguing for behind the scenes is unknown ...
but then that's part of the problem.

~~~
caseysoftware
They're using this data for _incredibly_ accurate targeting, allowing
advertisers to effectively target race/ethnicities:
[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/03/18/facebook-showed-
us-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/03/18/facebook-showed-us-all-very-
different-straight-outta-compton-trailers-based-on-race/)

I wrote a proof of concept on it last year too:
[http://caseysoftware.com/blog/social-apis-for-social-
evil](http://caseysoftware.com/blog/social-apis-for-social-evil)

------
kelukelugames
I think father-daughter and mother-son is interesting too.

Did they run something like TF-IDF to normalize for popular occupations?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf)

------
jseliger
This certainly makes sense: "To conclude, we see that people within a family
are proportionally more likely to eventually also choose the same occupation."
Still, I wonder if it has become less common with time: the idea of a parent
(usually a father) passing the family trade on to the child isn't culturally
common, as it used to be during the guild era that got started in the Middle
Ages.

On an anecdotal level, I got started as a grant writing consultant because my
parents started the business when I was a kid (I wrote a little more about
that here: [http://seliger.com/about/](http://seliger.com/about/)). But while
I became interested i the business as a teenager, neither of my siblings did,
and they both work in unrelated fields.

I also feel like I've met a disproportionate number of doctors whose parents
were doctors. It does seem like they'd pick up a fair amount of useful
information just listening to their parents talk.

~~~
hrktb
I think it can be less subtle than that. For instance a piano solist will
'test' children inclinement to play music, or more directly to play piano. I
know other engineers who also expose their kids to programming like games to
see if there is potential.

It doesn't mean the trade will be passed down as is, but if a kid seems
predisposed for a field, the parent with expertise will help it grow further
as long as the kid enjoys it.

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dredmorbius
Related: Gregory Clark, _The Son Also Rises_

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/son-also-rises-surnames-
and-t...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/son-also-rises-surnames-and-the-
history-of-social-mobility/oclc/861542619)

(And yes, Clark's got a thing for very bad Hemmingway puns.)

------
cheez
Is it just me or is the data presentation completely terrible

~~~
mateo411
I thought the data visualization was pretty good. How would you improve it?

A profession by profession table with the raw numbers would be more useful.
Perhaps a Hinton Diagram would be a better visualization.

~~~
kylec
It's very hard to get a sense of how more or less likely a child is to pursue
a given profession than normal. You just sort of have to eyeball the bars
before and after, which tends to visually accentuate changes to common
professions, even when there might be a much larger percentage change for an
uncommon profession.

------
exelius
This makes total sense -- you do what you know. As a child growing up, you
emulate your parents in a lot of ways. If your parents are factory workers,
they probably didn't push you towards college so you will end up in a similar
job. Likewise, if your parents are doctors, you not only have a path to
medical school laid out before you, you likely have connections that would
give you a better than average chance of acceptance.

Good to see this proven out with data; but I'd consider this a pretty
intuitive conclusion.

------
dmxt
Interesting data. I think we'll get very interesting data from Facebook if
they keep it up, considering they're one of companies who have the most data
on people.

------
jacquesm
[https://lornareiko.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/identical-
twins-...](https://lornareiko.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/identical-twins-who-
were-separated-at-birth-what-are-they-like/)

[http://articles.philly.com/1990-11-04/news/25926164_1_identi...](http://articles.philly.com/1990-11-04/news/25926164_1_identical-
twins-mark-newman-thomas-j-bouchard)

------
untog
I imagine the march of technological progress and America's shifts in
employment mean it is a lot less prevalent than it was a generation or so ago
- a lot fewer children following their parent into manufacturing jobs.

That said, my Dad worked in computing - not as a coder, just as a manager, but
it meant that we had an early proto-PC, a 2,400 baud modem and a CompuServe
connection. It was probably inevitable that I would end up doing something
with computers...

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traek
The interactive visualization is very neat. Interesting data, and an
interesting way of presenting the data.

------
jameshart
Why are all the resultsets segregated by gender? The description of the
problem they were looking to solve gave no indication that gender was of
interest to them in analyzing the results.

------
__john
That yellow when you hover over medicine/office contrasts very poorly w/ the
white background.

------
raister
that is very cute: fb doing research!

~~~
devishard
I'm not sure what you're saying here; Facebook does more research than some
universities. Their propensity for experimenting on their users is well-
documented, and while I disagree with their ethics, they do produce
significant, relevant and valid results.

~~~
jacquesm
If you're prepared to toss ethics overboard it's not that hard to come up with
significant, relevant and valid results. The whole trick is to get those
results _while_ acting ethical.

~~~
jonathankoren
Where's the ethical concern here? Familial relationships can be explicitly
provided as can occupation. If it's all self-reported data then what's the
problem?

The problem with the emotion manipulation study was that they were effecting
people's psychology, not just click behavior. Which is creepy, especially
because it apparently worked.

~~~
jacquesm
I find it interesting that you don't see the problem. I suspect that is a
large part of why companies like FB and the various advertising networks are
utterly blind to what will eventually be their downfall.

Here is a nice example of a sample consent form the kind of which one would
expect to fill out before having one's data be used for any kind of study:

[https://www.irb.cornell.edu/forms/sample.htm](https://www.irb.cornell.edu/forms/sample.htm)

Not being informed about the fact that your data is going to be used in a
study, that the results of that study are going to be published is un-ethical
in several ways, for one it presumes consent where non exists, for another it
is a breach of the law (because it violates the original purpose of
collection). Not that Facebook would care about any of the above but companies
and institutions that play by the rules would require the researcher
conducting this study to obtain consent from the subjects.

~~~
jonathankoren
Consent is given through the click-through user agreement and the data policy
[https://www.facebook.com/policy.php](https://www.facebook.com/policy.php) .
It's no different, and anything more is impractical. There are literally
hundreds if not thousands of tests being done simultaneously on overlapping
user populations.

