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Spencer Greenberg 🔍

@SpencrGreenberg

Apr 20

LGBTQ+ identity has been doubling from generation to generation. Gallup finds:
• 2% of Boomers
• 5% of Gen X
• 10% of Millennials
• 22% of Gen Z
identify as LGBTQ+

What's caused this rise?

At Clearer Thinking, we investigated, and the answer really surprised me:
🧵⬇️

The surface-level mystery has a simple answer: bisexual identification. Most of the increase in LGBTQ+ identity is from younger generations identifying more as bi. But this raises a deeper mystery:

Why are younger generations identifying as bisexual at such higher rates?

There are 3 main hypotheses for why bisexual identification has increased so much:

1️⃣ Social‑bandwagoning. People might be identifying as bisexual because it's trendy or they think it's a cool thing to be. This explanation tends to be favored by the right.

Read 15 tweets

Spencer Greenberg 🔍

@SpencrGreenberg

Mar 25

1/ Is the idea of IQ legit or total B.S.? With the replication crisis in social science, it's worth asking this since a number of major psychology findings didn't hold up under scrutiny.

To find out, at Clearer Thinking, we ran a massive study...🧵

2/ We tested thousands of people performing random subsets of 62 diverse cognitive tasks (vocab, math, logic, pattern recognition, reaction time, games, memorization, mental rotation, language learning, etc.).

3/ We successfully replicated a classic finding: performance on nearly all cognitive tasks correlates positively with performance on the other tasks—a phenomenon known as the "positive manifold," foundational to IQ (blue=positive, red=negative).

Read 13 tweets

Spencer Greenberg 🔍

@SpencrGreenberg

Mar 19

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is one of the most famous psychology findings. It's the idea that people of low competence/ability overestimate their ability. But is it REAL? At Clearer Thinking, we investigated (with surprising twists and turns): 🧵

First off, "Dunning-Kruger" is sometimes used to reference a 2nd related idea: that high-competence people *underestimate* their ability (the opposite of low-competence people)

We'll explore both ideas.

What was found in the original study about these effects?

They compared people's self-estimated ability to actual percentile scores on those tasks. If people were accurate self-assessors, the black line would closely match the grey. Instead, it seems low-skilled people overestimate their skills, and high-skilled ones underestimate:

Read 23 tweets

Spencer Greenberg 🔍

@SpencrGreenberg

Mar 2

Being one of history's most successful entrepreneurs is quite a different skill than making predictions about the future. So, I wondered how accurate Mսs𐔘's predictions are. I spent hours finding as many of them as I could, aiming to be as even-handed as possible:
🧵

Overall, I identified 50 predictions about the future he'd made for which it was confirmable whether they'd been correct. I skipped predictions that were too ambiguous to judge.

So, how did he do?

20% were correct predictions, and 80% were wrong.

How good or bad is this?

On the one hand, some of the things he is attempting to predict are hard to predict, so one might expect anyone to be wrong often. On the other hand, if we assume that he's at minimum 50% confident when he makes a public prediction, he ideally should be getting >50% right.

Read 7 tweets

Spencer Greenberg 🔍

@SpencrGreenberg

Jan 26

If you're convinced that astrology doesn't work at all (e.g., by studies like ours, where we tested 152 astrologers and found they were no better than random chance at matching people to charts), that raises an interesting question: why do astrologers believe astrology works? 🧵

1st hypothesis: they know astrology doesn’t work and lie for profit. But that seems very unlikely: many rely on it themselves and do it for friends/family. While surely there are some charlatans, most seem totally and genuinely convinced. So, what else could explain their belief?

2nd hypothesis: they're using "cold reading" without realizing it. I suspect astrologers often are very observant and make a number of fairly accurate inferences about a person that they then misattribute to the chart.

But don't the charts tell the astrologer what to say?

Read 16 tweets

Spencer Greenberg 🔍

@SpencrGreenberg

Aug 11, 2024

Does astrology work? We tested the ability of 152 astrologers to see if they could demonstrate genuine astrological skill.

Here is how the study was designed and what we found (including a result that really surprised me):

🧵

Back in January, we ran a study trying to predict 37 facts about people's lives using their astrological sun signs (whether they are Pisces, Aries, etc.) While personality tests were able to predict these facts decently well, sun signs couldn't predict even a single 1 of them...

Some astrologers criticized us for this, saying that sun signs/zodiac signs are just tabloid astrology - real astrologers use a person's entire astrological chart.

And they're right!

Taking into account this criticism, we got the help of 6 astrologers to design a new study.

Read 20 tweets

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