Top all-time · #4291
Philip N. Cohen
Personal blog · familyinequality.wordpress.comculturescience
Philip N. Cohen writes Family Inequality, a personal blog at familyinequality.wordpress.com about culture and science. Since 2012, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Philip N. Cohen's posts on family, marriage and divorce statistics, and on critiques of research such as the National Marriage Project's findings and generational groupings. They are mostly cited as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
by Philip N. Cohen
Most-linked posts?
- /2014/08/27/my-rejection-of-the-national-marriage-projects-before-i-do/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-08-04
- Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-28
What Hacker News says?
I think it depends on the genre. Sci-Hub is hugely popular [0] among academics and the academic publishers allege that they are missing out on a lot of money because of it (Can't find the source now). [0] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/sci-hub-us...
Comment linking /2020/01/15/sci-hub-users-cost-asa-journals-hundreds-of-thousands-of-downloads-and-thats-ok/
on “Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys”Submitted Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads as a story · 169 points
HN discussionThe trick is asking the right questions. I know a couple that divorced because one of them didn't want to be monogamous anymore. They tried to make it work, first one way, then the other, but in the end they couldn't. Do you think the other one is more likely to cheat or file for divorce than someone who's never been married? Children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorced, but I've never seen that stat…
Comment linking /2016/06/08/life-table-says-divorce-rate-is-52-7/
on “The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews”Submitted Theology majors marry each other a lot, but business majors don’t as a story · 126 points
HN discussionBe aware that grouping things by the respondents "generation" is actually meaningless[1] and likely to make you combine several real processes into random "effects". Trying to explain these arbitrary aggregations with a single story is obviously fruitless and mostly a good way to make up nonsense arguments. [1] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/open-lette...
Comment linking /2021/05/26/open-letter-to-the-pew-research-center-on-generation-labels/
on “When do we stop finding new music?”Submitted Our broken peer review system, in one saga as a story · 44 points
HN discussionI'm not going to spend too much time on this because I'm getting the sense that your request for an explanation was disingenuous. But: actually misleading There's a difference between "imperfect metaphor" and "misleading". higher proportion of hard-mode players choosing Paladin over Necromancer You make it sound as if each woman has individually and arbitrarily chosen to earn less. That's not the way it works, and t…
Comment linking /2012/09/25/alabama-matriarchy-debunking-the-end-of-men-edition/
on “Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech”Submitted American Sociological Association, in absentia but not silent on open science as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBut let's not pretend that historians influence the policy makers as much as sociologists and economists do either. The damages when they are wrong are orders of magnitude bigger. They are assumed to be right, sometimes even without proof, until they are tragically proven wrong. And nobody lose their job anyway. Have you ever seen a sociologist lose the job because proposed something to a politician that resulted in…
Comment linking /2017/10/02/sociologys-culture-of-trust-dont-verify/
on “If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999”Same author, more recent post [1] I really like the way that he expanded on this theory and talks about the authority that universities have accumulated and the effect that it is having on students. For more on this topic, I really recommend an article, Campus Protesters Aren’t Reliving the 1960s -- ( Yesterday’s student activists wanted to be treated like adults. Today’s want to be treated like children. ) [2] [1]:…
Comment linking /2015/11/09/university-paternalism-and-the-outwardly-focused-student-movement/
on “College Sex-Assault Trials Belong in Court, Not Campus (2014)”https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2016/06/07/no-black-w...
Comment linking /2016/06/07/no-black-women-are-not-the-most-educated-group-in-the-us/
on “VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality”As the co-author of "The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels" (Seal Press, Sept. 28) I find the post and the following comments intriguing. Correlation is not causation, and sociologist Philip Cohen has done a fine job of pointing out the difference with similar findings reported by the National Marriage Project ( http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/my-rejectio... ). I love wh…
Comment linking /2014/08/27/my-rejection-of-the-national-marriage-projects-before-i-do/
on “What makes for a stable marriage?”It's well more than editorial bias in some cases, it's blatantly misleading. Whether it's due to laziness and needing something catchy to write about, incompetence because they really don't understand statistics, or malice trying to pander or push a narrative I can't say. Two recent examples. * https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/more-bad-r... * https://twitter.com/StuartBuck1/status/847104688562548736
Comment linking /2017/03/09/more-bad-reporting-on-texting-and-driving/
on “Fake news is too big and messy to solve with algorithms or editors ”This has been my question as well, and few people want to consider it. The best data I've been able to find on actual gender split over that period only goes through 1996 [1] - just when the dotcom bubble was getting going. However, if you look at total CS degrees (look under "The third surge" in [2]) it at least seems pretty obvious what happened. Right around 1980 the number of CS degree students exploded, with me…
Comment linking /2013/11/23/supporting-material/
on “How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution”But that alone doesn’t explain the full gap. https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2019/11/06/man-woman-...
Comment linking /2019/11/06/man-woman-couple-height-updated/
on “I wish I was a little bit taller”Here's a rebuttal article as well, to bring nuance to the conversation: My rejection of the National Marriage Project’s “Before ‘I Do'” : https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/my-rejecti... I'd be interested if there has been follow up research since.
Comment linking /2014/08/27/my-rejection-of-the-national-marriage-projects-before-i-do/
on “What do premarital experiences have to do with marital quality? (2014)”US divorce rates have declined since the 1980s. Depending on how you look at the numbers, 50% is still a reasonable estimate.[1] Researchers attribute the decline in divorces partly to people being more cautious about marriage. [1] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/life-table...
Comment linking /2016/06/08/life-table-says-divorce-rate-is-52-7/
on “Young Americans Are Killing Marriage”Take this example. Black people are 37.8% of the prison population[0] and 12.3% of the general population[1]. They also have 72% of babies being born out of wedlock[2], compared to 29% of white-non hispanic babies[2]. Both those factors correlate to higher probabilities of crime in the future[3] and higher incarceration rates[4] So they are ~3x overrepresented in the prison population. So no. Even if you drop race,…
Comment linking /2011/10/20/single-parents-crime-and-incarceration/
on “Is your software racist?”1. Conservative think-tank, there's a lot missing from their analysis - "women who married as virgins had the lowest divorce rates by far." - this could be explained by things like the coercive social situation they found themselves in. 2. That source seems of questionable quality - https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/my-rejecti... 3 & 4 - seem irrelevant.
Comment linking /2014/08/27/my-rejection-of-the-national-marriage-projects-before-i-do/
on “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny”
