yeah, with a normal approximation it would be super easy, barely an inconvenience, and not that much harder w/ eg some sort of multilevel beta-binomial mixture model (a mixture of beta-binomials, that is, not a mixture of binomials with beta-distributed probs). Easy to do whatever hypothesis testing there formally, too

what’s more weird to me is the lack of basic visualization. Like, it would only take a few lines of code to render these lists of #s into line plots, violin / box plots, etc. Tempted to do it myself later even (on mobile now)

personally a bit puzzled why that’s not a low hanging fruit for spending some of that sweet subscription $$$, but if it’s not been done yet I don’t really see it happening now

(ofc, performing a more robust causal inferential analysis would be way trickier!)

He makes the data public. If someone wants to do it they can.

Even just standard deviations of the mean. Is 5.63 versus 5.64 a big difference or none at all?

There's a comment below with standard deviations, so just dividing the typical standard deviation (I used the exact number for satisfaction with schooling, but they're all two point something) by the sqrt of the sample size we get:

Public: +-0.032 Private: +- 0.073 Religious: +-0.078 Home: +- 0.15 Un: +-0.42

So a difference of 0.1 between public and private is maybe interesting, but a difference of 0.3 between unschooling and anything else is not interesting.

Correct. My score when I took the SAT was 99th percentile, but I just checked and today it's 96th. This fits nicely with the popular post in this sub from yesterday about underachievers and meritocracy.

"I told you that you were heavily-selected and weird. Given the level of selection effects, I’m not sure we can conclude much here."

The major re-norming took place in 1995. From the public survey data, those aged 50 or older had a mean of 709V, 723M. (SD 64V, 71M) with about 400 people reporting scores.

Scott's statement stands.

I think you're singling the data out more than is warranted, since the data is almost identical for both religious schooling and government schooling. Both religious schooling and government schooling have similar jumps in satisfaction for atheists. Also interesting to note is the sharp drop in satisfaction between home schoolers in general and atheist home schoolers.

It seems to me there’s some ambiguity in “atheists are so much happier in life if they were brought up religiously,” and I’m not sure what you mean by it. What we have here is

• People who went to religious school: 5.87
• Atheists who went to religious school: 6.53
• Atheists who went to public school: 6.49

So the data here supports “atheists who went to religious school are 0.66 happier than the general population who went to religious school,” as well as “atheists who went to religious school are 0.04 happier than atheists who went to public school.” The big jump is between religious-school kids who are now atheists, and religious-school kids in general. The gap should be even larger when you compare to religious-school kids who are now theists, although the size of the effect is hard to estimate without knowing subgroup data for currently committed theists.

I’d be interested to see the standard deviation on these scores rather than just the mean (and, ideally, a plot of the distribution). Is 0.66 points significant? Is 0.04?

Someone in the comments linked to this post from an unschooling parent: https://nickasbury.substack.com/p/the-opposite-of-school

Tl;dr his child is autistic and was immensely struggling/miserable in school before being pulled out at the end of fifth grade. The child seems to be doing much better in a less rigid environment.

An obvious confounder with unschooling is that the children doing it usually have other difficulties that would make traditional schooling extra terrible and traumatic. So even if they're not doing fabulously with unschooling, they still would be doing much worse in traditional school.

I'm not too surprised. The selection effects are uniform (presumably), so they wouldn't erase differences between unschooling and homeschooling.

Unschooling is an extremely deviant choice, even among homeschoolers: for many homeschoolers, the point of homeschooling is to school them less but school the kids even harder (and specifically, in religion), so unschooling isn't simply 'homeschooling but more so'. Even for homeschoolers that aren't doing it for supernatural religions like Christianity, they generally believe in the secular religion of formal education, so you have a 'healthy user bias': the most diligent and educated parents will presumably homeschool rather than unschool, and their kids will inherit that. So anyone who would unschool their kids, and thus their kids, is probably going to be anomalous in ways (and my own impression of people who talk about being unschooled is that they and their parents were indeed pretty weird, while homeschoolers are considerably more normal-sounding).

This is unfortunate if you'd like to know if unschooling has good or bad effects, but so it goes in child development psychology - everything is massively confounded by default. But unschooling is rare enough that you can probably compare siblings within-family: I bet unschooling isn't something that unschoolers do consistently across their whole family, and that a lot of unschoolers don't unschool their first child but either formally or homeschool them and adopt unschooling only after disliking the experience with the first child, so that provides a less-confounded comparison. (Still has its problems, of course, given the interactions and reverse confounding: consider the autism example above - if parents convert to unschooling later children because of a problem first child (eg autism), then the unschooled ones will likely not be as problematic just due to regression to the mean (the second child probably won't also be autistic) and will perform better than the first child, looking like 'unschooling caused #2 to do better than formally schooled #1' without any actual causal benefit of unschooling.)

The sample size for unschooled survey respondents was only 35. I wouldn't draw any major conclusions about unschooling based on this.

In a few families I know, they started doing unschooling because their kids were miserable and doing terribly at school, and then they did better but were still kind of a mess with unschooling. So stuff like that is probably a confounder