Tag: science

The three laws of behavioral genetics

JayMan explicates them:

  • First Law. All human behavioral traits are heritable.
  • Second Law. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
  • Third Law. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

These laws are more controversial than they should be. No one who comes from a large family will find it easy to take exception to them, and anyone who does must be put to the objective test.

What, specifically, is a behavioral trait that is not heritable? And how would one go about demonstrating that? My impression is that as with many other issues, the fact that most people are binary thinkers renders it very difficult for them to grasp the truth of probabilistic matters. If it can’t be answered with an absolute “yes, always”, then they assume that the answer must necessarily be “no, never”.

Explaining the mental gymnasts

Anonymous Conservative explains the bizarre affection the Left habitually displays for Islam, despite the way in which it goes against nearly everything they say they believe:

One religion is held in utter contempt, while the other receives freely groveling praise and welcoming admiration. Which is which?

Again, rabbits don’t grovel before Muslims because they think it through, and decide to appease the people who could kill them. Rather, their mind touches violent Islam tentatively and experiences an almost imperceptible shot of fear – in rabbit-speak, a triggering. Their brain then looks at the facts of the matter, and subconsciously realizes that embracing Islam as superior, is the least amygdala stimulating of the various thoughts running through their head. Far less stimulating than insulting or opposing Islam and being killed, and far less than consciously groveling at the feet of people they intellectually acknowledge reviling, to save their own lives. If they embrace Islam and believe their own embrace is true, they can even claim to be intellectual, moral, and tolerant, all best described as anti-triggering concepts in the rabbit’s mind.

Here, once this feat of mental gymnastics occurs, you enter a strange realm. Their initial jump to the counter-intuitive position has already been established in their mind as not due to some deficit of intellect, but rather due to the immensity of their intellect. At that point, the more counter to logic the position embraced by the rabbit, the more they see it as a mark of their tolerance, evolved-ness, advancement, and superiority over the more base, primitive, stupid, caveman-like tendencies of their opposition.

You have to view leftism and rabbitism as simple logical programs, run as if on computer, by a mind that cannot tolerate triggering, and which will believe anything to avoid experiencing it.

I’m pleased to be able to say that Anonymous Conservative is now an Associate of Castalia House, so if you wish to purchase his books in either EPUB or Kindle format, you can now do so through our online store. I highly recommend both of them, as they offer genuine insight into the Left from a perspective that is as unique as it is informative.

Both books provide a useful, hands-on theoretical explanation for behavior that we have all witnessed and found inexplicable. While AC would be the first to agree that considerably more scientific evidence would be required before one could assert either of his primary hypotheses as unassailable fact, even in the absence of published peer review they are very useful heuristics in attempting to better understand, and deal with, the literal lunatics of the political Left.

The randomness of scientistry

Science is finally turning scientody on scientistry… and the results are not as self-flattering to professional science as most scientists expected.

The NIPS consistency experiment was an amazing, courageous move by the organizers this year to quantify the randomness in the review process. They split the program committee down the middle, effectively forming two independent program committees. Most submitted papers were assigned to a single side, but 10% of submissions (166) were reviewed by both halves of the committee. This let them observe how consistent the two committees were on which papers to accept.  (For fairness, they ultimately accepted any paper that was accepted by either committee.)

The results were revealed this week: of the 166 papers, the two committees disagreed on the fates of 25.3% of them: 42. But this “25%” number is misleading, and most people I’ve talked to have misunderstood it: it actually means that the two committees disagreed more than they agreed on which papers to accept. Let me explain.

The two committees were each tasked with a 22.5% acceptance rate. This would mean choosing about 37 of the 166 papers to accept. Since they disagreed on 42 papers total, this means each committee accepted 21 papers that the other committee rejected and vice versa, for 21 + 21 = 42 total papers with different outcomes. Since they each accepted 37 papers, this means they disagreed on 21/37 ≈ 56% of the list of accepted papers.

In particular, 56% of the papers accepted by the first committee were rejected by the second one and vice versa. In other words, most papers at NIPS would be rejected if one reran the conference review process (with a 95% confidence interval of 40-75%).

What rightly concerns the writer is the fact that a purely random process would have resulted in a 77.5 percent disagreement, which is closer to the 56 percent observed than the 30 percent expected. And, of course, the 0 percent that the science fetishists would have us believe is always the case.

This is a very important experiment, because it highlights the huge gap between science the process (scientody) and science the profession (scientistry). Some may roll their eyes at my insistence on using different words for the different aspects of science, but the observable fact, the scientodically informed fact, is that using the same word to refer to the two very differently reliable aspects of science is incredibly misleading.

The perils of philosophy

John Wright challenges the concept of IQ:

Since I am apparently one of those self deceived idiots, allow me to say that the predictive ability of people who do well on one kind of intellectual test to do well on another kind of intellectual test is not science. It is not the empirical measurement of an observable reality.

I could with even greater accuracy predict that the winners of beauty pageants will be shapely women who are in favor of world peace.

I can also predict she will wear a crown and carry a bouquet.

No matter how accurate such a prediction, it is not science. Beauty is not a thing that can be measured and neither is the degree of craving for world peace.

It is (at best) confirming a correlation. This is not the same as Newton determining the laws of gravity from which accurate descriptions of falling apples and orbiting planets can be deduced mathematically. 

Such are the perils of a philosopher wading out into the perilous waters of science. What is not observable about an intellectual test? What is less empirical about a percentage of correct answers than a quantity of inches or a measure of weight? And, of course, the science of intelligence goes far beyond people taking two or more intellectual tests. It is no less scientific than any other branch of genetic science, in which the birth of a baby with blue eyes can be predicted or the disease of a child yet unconceived can be anticipated on the basis of his parents’ genetics.

Science does not require precisely defined measurements to be science. It need only be observable, testable, and repeatable. The fact that it is harder to agree upon a measure for intelligence than one for height does not mean that intelligence is not observable or that the predictive model is unreliable. John appears to be erroneously targeting the fuzzy metric presently used to quantify intelligence and thinking this is sufficient to call the entire science into question.

Would he also claim that weight does not exist or is unscientific? After all, it is even harder to predict the adult weight of a baby than his IQ on the basis of his parents. As other commenters have pointed out, we have a pretty good idea of the heritability of g, so how can it be reasonably asserted that there is no use of the scientific process being utilized? We have seen and observed a considerable number of relevant hypotheses being tested, both formally and informally, after all.

And beauty, at least in some of its forms, can be measured, as the picture below demonstrates.

IQ is real and reliable

Jerry Pournelle talks about a past predictive program that was terminated because it worked:

I have a number of letters from people who try to account for differences in mean IQ among races – a phenomenon found and confirmed so often that it must be assumed to be true – by various factors, the most common of which is culture. A number of competent differential psychologists who would have wished to find that all those differences can be truly accounted for by cultural (and thus changeable) factors have devoted a great deal of effort to trying to prove that, and to eliminate all cultural factors from IQ tests, but they have not been able to do so….

There is no single item in any IQ test that identifies the race of
the person taking that test. Any such item, if there ever were any, has
long since been eliminated. You may look at IQ tests until you are blue
in the face and you won’t find the “racial code” items, because they are
not there. A lot of very smart people have worked hard to see to that. But IQ tests do predict academic success. And the University of
Washington developed a Grade Prediction Program that did much more. I
worked on it as a graduate student. The experiment was paid for by Navy
Research.

Basically, for all incoming freshmen, we took measures of almost
anything you can think of that might affect academic grades, and
recorded the grades those students achieved in four years of instruction
at the University of Washington. We recorded high school class rank,
and grades in high school subject areas. We gave batteries of tests to
the incoming freshmen. We took ratings and estimates from counselors
(which were not easy to get because counselors are not accustomed to
making numerical estimates, and sure enough, they weren’t much use in
the final predictions). We even threw in height and weight. We did not
record race, religion, national origin, or socio-economic status.

All this stuff went into a huge matrix, one line of a couple of dozen
predictors for each student. Then over time we built another matrix,
one line of grade results for each person. This whole thing then went
into a huge program to find the correlation of each item in the
predictors with each item in the results. This would be a number from 0
to 0.99; actually I think the highest predictor item was about 0.8,
which was IQ. Many of the predictors were near enough to zero that it
could reasonably be concluded that they could be eliminated. There were
one or two predictors that correlated highly with some fields of study
and not at all with others; the formula was adjusted for that so these
predictors were only used in prediction of relevant academic areas.

And lo! After a few years of taking results and honing the prediction
equations, every incoming freshman was given a grade prediction for a
number of academic area. Be a math major and you will be an A student,
but you will flunk out of biology. Actually, of course, that would be a
rare result: people who were predicted to be A students in any area were
likely to have higher predictions for other areas. An A prediction in
engineering would very likely to be accompanied by an A prediction as an
education major. Of course an prediction of an A average in Education
was not necessarily accompanied by the prediction of an A in anything
else.

The program was successful, but it is no longer used, because the
average grades predicted for Black and Hispanic students was lower than
the average grades predicted for White students. There was no single
item in any test that identified the race of the student, but those who
set out to prove this thesis managed to find that out.

The beauty of science is that it eventually calls one’s assumptions and ideologies to account. At this point, one can only laugh at those who claim that human intelligence doesn’t exist, that IQ doesn’t measure anything, that neither IQ nor intelligence has no any link to race, and so forth. IQ is a very powerful predictive model of human intelligence, in fact, it is one of the more reliable predictive models that we have. It may not be fine-grained, it may not account for the full range of human accomplishment, and it may not be deterministic, but so what?

A metric’s failure to be absolutely perfect in every regard does not render it useless.  In fact, conservatives should take note that one of the most useful things about IQ is that it completely undermines the entire equalitarian program and renders it intellectually hors de combat.

If, in the interest of maintaining your belief in unicorns, leprechauns, and human equality, you are still trying to claim that whites are intellectually identical to Asians are intellectually the same as Africans, or asserting that it makes no difference whether someone scores +2SD or -2SD on an IQ test, you are worse than an idiot. You are being intentionally and willfully dishonest with yourself; you are deceiving yourself. And self-deceit is not a sound foundation from which to determine the truth about anything.

Destroying the community to diversify it

There is no Paradox of Diverse Communities; one horn of the dilemma is simply false. So, the answer to his question is, yes,  we shouldn’t fight against self-segregation, because divisiveness and a lack of community cohesion are intrinsically dyscivic. In fact, we should actively promote racial, cutural, linguistic, religious segregation in the interest of long term peace and harmonious civil relations across various human differences:

Urbanists and planners like to imagine and design for a world of diversity. Diversity, we like to think, is both a social good and, as I’ve argued, a spur to innovation and economic growth.

But to what degree is this goal of diverse, cohesive community attainable, even in theory?

That’s the key question behind an intriguing new study, “The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community,” published in the November edition of the American Journal of Community Psychology. The study, by sociologist Zachary Neal and psychologist Jennifer Watling Neal, both of Michigan State University (full disclosure: I was an external member of the former’s dissertation committee), develops a nifty agent-based computer model to test this question.

Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.”

They are correct to point to the “federation” concept as a possible solution, but they are thinking on too small a scale. Neighborwide segregation is not enough. It should be state-wide. People like to point to the Swiss model as being an example of successful integration, what they don’t realize is that religious, linguistic, and ethnic cleansing were utilized in establishing the Swiss cantons; that is why the cantons are still identified as “Protestant” or “Catholic” cantons as well as being on one side or the other of the Franco-German divide.

But more importantly, the federation concept cannot work without decentralized government. There is no point in encouraging Somalis or Nigerians to live in segregated neighborhoods if they are legally held to German or Japanese standards by a higher-level government.

The fact is that diversity is a social ill and it exacerbates rather than reduces racial tensions. I can attest that no one in Minnesota had an opinion about Somalis or Liberians 20 years ago. In only two decades, diversity has caused tens of thousands of formerly indifferent people to actively despise them. It would be interesting to test this hypothesis by using contributions to African-related charities as a metric. I surmise that there is a lower percentage of White Minneapolis residents donating to charities that aid Africa now that diversity and immigration have given them some first-hand experience of actual Africans.

Diversity destroys communities. That is the observable fact. Diversity destroys the common interest. To be pro-diversity is necessarily to be anti-communitarian and against the common interest. There is the real paradox: the progressive who claims to be a pro-diversity communitarian.

Loro stanno con Rosetta

If the feminists were upset about Matt Taylor’s shirt, this Italian pro-science movement should absolutely explode their minds. I look forward to the AAS’s statement on Tette per la Scienza. And to think people wonder why I love Italy and the Italians. They’re simply awesome. But Meg Urry and her friends at AAS need not worry, as the female founder has assured us there is absolutely no risk that Tette per la Scienza will reinforce sexism in Italy. #NoShirtGate

I can’t even imagine what will happen if the Italians ever embrace the “I F—— Love Science” meme. Come mai dicono cosi? Che pornografia? Non esiste! Facciamo SCIENZA!

Rosetta, you may recall, is the European Space Agency vehicle that landed on the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Female Supremacy: The Endless Quest

It seems Martin van Creveld may need to reconsider the title of his forthcoming work for Castalia House in light of how feminists are not even pretending feminism is about equality anymore:

Girls write more complex programs and learn more about coding than boys when it comes to making computer games, a study has found.

A group of 12 – 13-year old pupils spent eight weeks developing their own 3D role playing games as part of the University of Sussex study. Dr Kate Howland and Dr Judith Good developed Flip, a programming language which uses a simple interface to help the pupils string together scripts, basic programs which trigger a change within the game, such as a message popping up once a treasure chest is opened.

The girls used seven triggers within the games, almost twice as many as the boys of the group, and were much more successful at creating complex scripts with two or more parts and conditional clauses. Boys had a tendency to build their triggers around when a character said something, the most first and most simple trigger the class learned. 

The games were created using software made available with fantasy game
Neverwinter Nights 2, while Flip also translated the programs into English
to help the students understand the scripts they’d created.

In other words, if adults dumb down a male activity and require girls to do it, the female interest in doing well scholastically and obediently pleasing their authority figures will cause them to outperform boys who just want to shoot people and blow things up.

Naturally, this not-at-all cherry-planted-watered-and-carefully-harvested discovery completely supersedes forty years and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of economic activity created by young men who never had to be taught or encouraged to do anything. Many of us old school developers were actively discouraged from doing what we did; some of us don’t even have college degrees of any kind.

Did you even need to see the names to know that the “scientists” were women? This is precisely why the big push to get more women in STEM is certain to fail. Even when they manage to shepherd women through the educational process, most of them turn out to be more interested in fashion and thought-policing than they are in, you know, anything that resembles actual science.

Fashion is the new science

The AAS releases a formal statement concerning men’s fashion:

The following statement was issued on 19 November 2014 by the Executive Committee of the American Astronomical Society on behalf of the AAS Council:

The past few days have seen extensive international discussion of an incident (known online as #shirtstorm or #shirtgate) in which a participant in a European Space Agency media conference wore a shirt with sexualized images of gun-toting women and made an unfortunate remark comparing the featured spacecraft to a woman. Viewers responded critically to these inappropriate statements, especially jarring in such a highly visible setting (one in which very few women appeared), and the scientist apologized sincerely. But in the meantime, unacceptable abuse has been directed toward the critics, from criticism of “over-active feminism” to personal insults and more dire threats.

We wish to express our support for members of the community who rightly brought this issue to the fore, and we condemn the unreasonable attacks they experienced as a result, which caused deep distress in our community. We do appreciate the scientist’s sincere and unqualified apology.

The AAS has a clear anti-harassment policy, which prohibits “verbal comments or physical actions of a sexual nature” and “a display of sexually suggestive objects or pictures.” Had the offending images appeared and comments been made under the auspices of the AAS, they would be in clear violation of our policy.

If I were a scientist, I would immediately resign from any organization that was releasing statements on fashion, much less had a formal policy on what I could and could not wear.

I’m sure it will surprise no one to know that the president of the AAS is a female SJW. The sad thing about this isn’t that most women care more about clothes and politics than science; we already knew that. What is both tragic and observable is that even women who are professional scientists care more about clothes and politics than science. They aren’t merely an embarrassment to their sex, they are the epitome of a humiliating shame to it.

It can’t possibly be true that “unacceptable abuse has been directed toward the critics”. Whatever abuse they received not only was well-merited, but didn’t go nearly far enough because they deserve shameless mocking for the rest of their pathetic lives.

And this is why you don’t let SJWs into any organization to which you belong. Because this is what they do.

In defense of scientists

The Mayor of London speaks out in favor of science nerd fashion:

I watched that clip of Dr Taylor’s apology – at the moment of his supreme professional triumph – and I felt the red mist come down. It was like something from the show trials of Stalin, or from the sobbing testimony of the enemies of Kim Il-sung, before they were taken away and shot. It was like a scene from Mao’s cultural revolution when weeping intellectuals were forced to confess their crimes against the people.

Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.

And so I want, naturally, to defend this blameless man. And as for all those who have monstered him and convicted him in the kangaroo court of the web – they should all be ashamed of themselves.

Yes, I suppose some might say that his Hawaii shirt was a bit garish, a bit of an eyeful. But the man is not a priest, for heaven’s sake. He is a space scientist with a fine collection of tattoos, and if you are an extrovert space scientist, that is the kind of shirt that you are allowed to wear.

As for myself, I’m not a fan of either the tattoos or the garish shirt. Dr. Taylor’s tears certainly revealed that tattoo sleeves don’t indicate any degree of toughness; he would have done far better to give that second interview in a Grand Theft Auto shirt and flipped a symbolic bird to his idiot critics.

But #ShirtStorm was a useful reminder of what we’ve learned from #GamerGate. One cannot compromise with pinkshirts because they don’t believe in compromise. They believe in taking eternal offense and staying on the permanent offensive. They are like sharks; if they are not complaining and attacking, they lose their assumed power.

I know I’ve said this several times over the last few days, but I cannot repeat it enough. NEVER APOLOGIZE. SJWs regard apologies as weakness, as leverage, and as a ritual preface to complete submission. I can assure you from personal experience, all their hatred is nothing more than sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing. The only response to their attacks and their attempts to create false equivalences and assign false meanings should be to pour unrestrained scorn on their heads.