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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   14183 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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if that variation is true, why don't we see it in life expectancy and althetic records?

I'm reminded of the factoid that most professional hockey players have birthdays towards the beginning of the year, because the peewee leagues have cutoffs on New Year's Day. So you get more attention because you're statistically larger / have 11 months more growing time as a January peewee player than a December peewee player. It didn't require a proper scientific study, but someone just looking up professional hockey player birthdays and going, "huh".

I would be surprised, but maybe no one has done significant birthday analyses with regards to life expectancy and athletic records because it would feel like silly astrology. That's kind of why even analyses that can be painted as "silly" in a soundbyte, say, during a Presidential Address to Congress, might have a legitimately interesting motivation: are you doing this analysis because of "astrology" or because of epigenetic effects based on seasonal variations during gestation?

Either way, I think you're striking at the heart of the issue: we probably don't need to hook people up to devices that measure vitals in order to determine if there are measurable differences based on the calendar dates of their gestation. If the difference is meaningful, we should be able to see downstream effects in, as you said, life expectancy and athletic records, and other examples as well.

because the peewee leagues have cutoffs on New Year's Day.

it's important for the young but it shouldn't have effect on lifetime records

The kids that do well in a sport early on get extra encouragement, coaching, motivation, and more.

Yes, comment below made me think this too. But what if there is such effect for weight gain/loss too?

Shouldn't? Or doesn't?

The factoid I'm familiar with comes from Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers", in which he dubs the concept "accumulative advantage": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)

Allegedly, elite Canadian hockey players tend to have birthdays earlier in the year.

Edit: this medium post shows the results of a very rudimentary data gathering exercise relevant to the topic: https://medium.com/market-failures/birth-months-and-hockey-players-further-validating-gladwells-observation-1187f4deb63b

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