I feel like I see the “millennials are normies too” headline pretty often, but when you go in and look at what they controlled for in the study, it’s:

– money
– urban/rural
– race
– number of children
– literally anything else that might make a generational cohort significant pic.twitter.com/TTfGpQU10F

— Vaughn Campbell (@Camp_bell_) July 3, 2019

I do think most scientists are attempting to be honest most of the time, but this is a common scientist trick where they control for anything and everything that makes any difference, and then declare there is no difference. What a shocker, there. Kevin Drum pulls this one, too, but he’s definitely not attempting probity.

There is of course a political agenda* with examination of millennials and their proclivities, so that is always more distorted than most other areas but even outside of this it seems a pervasive scientific blindness to the world to “control” away most of what you are explicitly attempting to measure and then declare it does not exist. Why this is the case even outside of political point-scoring I don’t know.

*The agenda here being to show that the world is not changing, therefore has no reason to change.