You appear to be referring to Nisbett’s paragraph starting with
Hedges and Nowell (1998) found improvement on almost all tests for African American 12th graders compared with other 12th graders over the period 1965-1994.
A few sentences below that Nisbett refers to NAEP data to say that the reading score gap could be gone in 25 years and the science score gap in 75 years, if trends continue. [ETA: this is the ‘largest study’ that Nisbett cites. I’m sad Nisbett didn’t give a more specific citation for it.]
The page you link appears to have data on the NAEP tests, but only for the mathematics tests. Clicking on the ‘White-Black Gap’ button, and then on the ‘Age 17’ tab (as Nisbett refers to 12th graders, so I am guessing that is what he and you are talking about...?) shows
a 1973 gap of 40 points
a 1982 gap of 32 points
a 1986 gap of 29 points
a 1990 gap of 21 points
then some fluctuations between 26 and 31 points until the most recent survey (2008), which has a 26 point gap
The data linked do not appear to bear strongly on Nisbett’s claims about the NAEP data (because Nisbett refers to the reading and science NAEP scores, not math), and I am also having difficulty seeing the ‘small narrowing of the black/white gap between 1973 and 1982 and a fairly consistent gap thereafter.’ in the data linked.
All in all, I am having difficulty substantiating your claim that Nisbett’s claim is unsubstantiated by the data. I suspect either I am not interpreting your comment correctly, or the link in it happens to point to a data set other than the one you intended. Could you clarify?
The page you link appears to have data on the NAEP tests, but only for the mathematics tests.
I chose it at random and stopped with the first graph I found so nobody could accuse me of cherry picking. Looking more carefully at what Nisbett wrote, I see he did not specifically mention math scores.
I’m not sure if this makes a difference. If Nisbett was cherry-picking data, it doesn’t really help his argument.
All in all, I am having difficulty substantiating your claim that Nisbett’s claim is unsubstantiated by the data.
The one graph I looked at at random doesn’t seem to support the claim that the gap (generally speaking) is narrowing and headed towards disappearing. Agreed?
The one graph I looked at at random doesn’t seem to support the claim that the gap (generally speaking) is narrowing and headed towards disappearing. Agreed?
When I see your random graph, I see the gap halving[!] from 1973 to 1990, widening through the 1990s, and maybe gradually shrunking since then. I see contradictory trends over the past 40 years, but it’s more likely than not that the gap has resumed narrowing. So I’m not sure I do agree with you.
Since you write ‘generally speaking’ I guess you might be asking about the general trend as a whole from 1973 to now. I reckon that’s an overall shrinking trend too.
To check my gut feeling more systematically, I did a quick regression of the score gap against year. (Not the best way to do it, but it beats eyeballing.) That gets me a .35 or .36 point shrinking per year depending on which assessment format I use for 2004. At that rate, the current gap (26 points in ’08) would disappear in 70 to 75 years.
That’s the same time period Nisbett gives for the disappearance of the science score gap, which I think is evidence against Nisbett ‘cherry-picking’ - if he cut out data because it had gaps that closed too slowly for his hypothesis, he would’ve left out the science data as well as the math data.
Summing up, I think I fundamentally disagree with you on the most likely interpretation of your graph.
Aha, I misunderstood which chart you had in mind. I thought that your link was intended to go to the data for 17 year olds, but that you were unable to link it directly because the page used Javascript to flip between the charts for different ages. I see now I’m wrong about that—one can link directly to the chart for each age, and it sounds like you were pointing to the age 9 data.
So I’ll try this again with the 9 year olds. I’ve taken the liberty of looking at the black-white gap graph instead of the scale score graph so I don’t have to do any mental arithmetic to get the gap size at each testing. Looks to me like the gap consistently narrowed from 1973 to 1986, and has fluctuated from 1986 so it’s sometimes wider, sometimes thinner, but no overall trend since then.
Regressing gap size on year like I did before gives a shrinking of .24 or .25 points per year. So the picture is more mixed than for the older kids: there’s an overall shrinking, but it’s only two-thirds what you get for 17 year olds, and the trend looks like it’s stalled since the late 80s.
Still, I am not sure that this means Nisbett is wrong. Looking at the bit of Nisbett you quote yourself downthread, Nisbett does not seem to say anything about the math scores, which means looking at the math scores would not tell us whether Nisbett is wrong or right.
It is possible that Nisbett cherry-picked by ignoring the math data, but I think a .25 point per year narrowing is still evidence against that idea. At a quarter point per year, the math gap would disappear in about a century, which isn’t much longer than the 75 years Nisbett suggests for science.
Of course there are ways to interpret the graph to argue that the gap is narrowing and on track to disappear, but if you look at it and use your common sense, it’s just not a reasonable conclusion.
The reasonable conclusion—as you allude to—is that the gap has been pretty much stable for a number of years.
Of course there are ways to interpret the graph to argue that the gap is narrowing and on track to disappear, but if you look at it and use your common sense, it’s just not a reasonable conclusion.
You put more trust in your common sense than I do. I try to avoid depending exclusively on what my common sense infers from eyeballing noisy time series—that way lies ’global warming stopped in 1998’esque error.
I find your preferred interpretation reasonable, but I don’t see why it would be unreasonable to look at the entire data and see a net narrowing. (Especially if we lacked the 2008 data, as Nisbett did.)
If the choice is between trusting your common sense and trusting someone with an agenda, I would say go with your common sense.
Here’s a thought experiment: You show the graph I linked to to 10 statisticians, except you replace the labels with something less politically charged. For example, the price of winter wheat versus the price of summer wheat. And you ask them to interpret the graph as far as long term trends go. I’m pretty confident that 10 out of 10 would interpret the graph the same way I did.
Ditto for global surface temperatures. Take the temperature label off the graph and tell people it’s the dollar to yen exchange rate. I bet 10 out of 10 statisticians will say the rate is basically flat for the last 10 years.
Ditto for global surface temperatures. Take the temperature label off the graph and tell people it’s the dollar to yen exchange rate. I bet 10 out of 10 statisticians will say the rate is basically flat for the last 10 years.
cupholder has the empirical data—which, you will note, is increasing in all cases—but do you really imagine that no-one’s tried a blind test?
cupholder has the empirical data—which, you will note, is increasing in all cases—but do you really imagine that no-one’s tried a blind test?
No I do not imagine so. But I’m a little confused. Are you saying that the absence of significant cooling is the same thing as the presence of significant warming?
PS: The empirical data is not “increasing in all cases.” Indeed, by most accounts global surface temperatures have not met or exceeded the high reached 12 years ago.
Every 10-year trendline in cupholder’s data was increasing.
If you give a statistician the 30-year or 130-year data set with the y-axis label taken off, they will tell you that there is no sign of a levelling-off.
Every 10-year trendline in cupholder’s data was increasing.
A quick clarification: for each of the data links I posted there, the trendline is calculated based on all of the data that’s shown, i.e. for the post-1998 data the trendline is based on the last twelve years, for the post-1970s data the trendline is based on all of the post-1970s data, and so on. In other words, only the data for the last 10 years of data really have a 10-year trendline.
[ETA: Unless you mean you calculated 10-year trendlines for each data set yourself, in which case feel free to disregard this.]
The linear trend is definitely decreasing for this particular plot.
If you give a statistician the 30-year or 130-year data set with the y-axis label taken off, they will tell you that there is no sign of a levelling-off.
I’m seriously skeptical of this.
P.S. Are you saying that the absence of significant cooling is the same thing as the presence of significant warming?
Note that changing the beginning data point to either 1997 or 1999 makes the regression line have a positive slope. It’s not at all surprising that there is enough variability that cherry-picking data is possible. Stuffing a positive outlier at the beginning will, of course, tend to do this.
Note that changing the beginning data point to either 1997 or 1999 makes the regression line have a positive slope.
Agreed. I cherry-picked 1998 as a starting point to counter the claim that the data was increasing “in all cases.”
Still, I would also note that as I explain on my blog post, there is some significance to the observation that global surface temperatures still have not exceeded the 1998 high. (According to the majority of leading temperature measurements.)
In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.
“If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,” said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.
[...]
The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA’s year-to-year ground temperature changes over 130 years and the 30 years of satellite-measured temperatures preferred by skeptics and gathered by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.
Saying there’s a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.
Identifying a downward trend is a case of “people coming at the data with preconceived notions,” said Peterson, author of the book “Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision Analysis.”
1998 was a strong El Nino year—unusually high atmospheric temperatures that year in no way suggests that the earth has stopped heating.
I’m claiming that this one data set does not by itself support rejection of the body of theory that suggests global warming is occurring, and that it is intellectually dishonest to imply that it does.
Well answered (and I have downvoted brazil for trying to coerce you into making a stupid claim with the obvious intent of presenting a misleading dichotomy.)
I’m not sure what the claim “global warming is occuring” means so I can’t really speak to that.
In any event, as I noted in the blog post, the warmists have made specific predictions. The temperature record for the past 10 or so years contradicts some of those predictions.
ETA: Can I take it that your answer to my question is “no”?
I’m not saying the absence of a significant cooling trend is the same thing as the presence of a significant warming trend—that would be a stupid thing to say. As for the remainder: I don’t trust your judgment, but the data you provided is interesting. I will examine the composite NOAA temperature data (ocean, land, and combined) and update accordingly.
(It should be noted, however, that if anthropogenic inputs are significant, as claimed by the climate scientists whose work we are discussing, predicting the climate would require predicting all anthropogenic climate forcings—and therefore we might expect the predictions to be worse than anticipated.)
It should be noted, however, that if anthropogenic inputs are significant, as claimed by the climate scientists whose work we are discussing, predicting the climate would require predicting all anthropogenic climate forcings—and therefore we might expect the predictions to be worse than anticipated.
They can get around this by expressing their predictions as a function of future anthropogenic emissions, thus removing this source of uncertainty.
I’m not saying the absence of a significant cooling trend is the same thing as the presence of a significant warming trend—that would be a stupid thing to say
Correct. Which is why the article you linked to does not contradict the claim I made.
As for the remainder: I don’t trust your judgment, but the data you provided is interesting
Well you shouldn’t trust my judgment. What’s the motto of the British science academy? Something like “Don’t take my word for it.”
Here’s a thought experiment: You show the graph I linked to to 10 statisticians, except you replace the labels with something less politically charged. For example, the price of winter wheat versus the price of summer wheat. And you ask them to interpret the graph as far as long term trends go. I’m pretty confident that 10 out of 10 would interpret the graph the same way I did.
I am far less confident.
Ditto for global surface temperatures. Take the temperature label off the graph and tell people it’s the dollar to yen exchange rate. I bet 10 out of 10 statisticians will say the rate is basically flat for the last 10 years.
If the choice is between trusting your common sense and trusting someone with an agenda, I would say go with your common sense.
That sounds nice, but I don’t know how practical that would turn out to be, in this case or in general. In this particular case, how can I even tell with certainty whether you have ‘an agenda’ or not? And what if the key participants in a debate all have some agenda? It’s very possible that Nisbett has a ‘politically correct’ (not that I like the phrase, but I can’t think of a better way of putting it) agenda, and that Rushton and Jensen have a ‘politically incorrect’ agenda. How do I know, and what do I do if they do? And so on.
In this particular case, how can I even tell with certainty whether you have ‘an agenda’ or not?
How can you tell anything with certainty? The fact is that you can’t. Respectfully, it seems to me you are playing the “I’m such a skeptic” game.
Let me ask you this: Do you seriously doubt that Nisbett has an agenda?
Do you give them data for the past 10 years, data since 1998, the data since they started measuring temperatures with satellites as well as thermometers, or the longest-running data set, which runs from 1850 onwards
I would give them the data since the 1970s when sattelite measurement became possible.
How can you tell anything with certainty? The fact is that you can’t. Respectfully, it seems to me you are playing the “I’m such a skeptic” game.
Sorry. I was being sloppy in my earlier comment, and using ‘certainty’ as a shorthand for ‘certainty enough for me to label you as Having An Agenda, and therefore to reject your interpretation of the data as Tainted With An Agenda.’ It is of course true that you can’t tell anything inductive with cast-iron 100% certainty, but what I’m getting at is the question of how to get to what you or I would practically treat as certainty (like if I put a 95% probability on someone Having An Agenda).
Let me rephrase: in this particular case, how can I even tell whether you have ‘an agenda’ with sufficient certainty to disregard whatever you say about the data, and retreat to my own common sense gut feeling?
Let me ask you this: Do you seriously doubt that Nisbett has an agenda?
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he believes he’s right? A tiny bit, but only in the sense that I am never completely sure of another person’s motivation for stating something.
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he wants to convince other people of what he believes? Not really.
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he has an emotional investment in the argument as well as rational considerations? Only a little...but then again, who doesn’t get emotionally invested in arguments?
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he has political motivations for his article as well as self-centered emotional and rational ones? Quite a lot, actually. I don’t think I could reliably tell Nisbett’s emotional motivations apart from those that spring from his political agenda (whatever that is—Nisbett sounds like a leftist to me, but how the hell do I really know? There were rightists who crapped on The Bell Curve too.) Does it even make sense to distinguish the two? I’m not sure. (I suddenly feel that these are good questions to think about. Thank you for prodding me into thinking of them.)
Also, for whatever it’s worth, I am just as sure that Rushton and Jensen have ‘an agenda,’ however you want to define that, as Nisbett does. Do I throw all their papers out and just go with my common sense?
To clarify, this doesn’t mean I can’t get behind the idea of being alert to other people’s biases on some subject, but I’m not willing to push that to the point of a dichotomy between my common sense vs. someone with an agenda. Taking the global warming example, I’m sure many climate scientists have ‘an agenda,’ but I’d still tend to accept their consensus interpretation of the data than my own common sense where the two differ, and I think that’s reasonable if I don’t have time to dig through all of the research myself.
I would give them the data since the 1970s when sattelite measurement became possible.
In that case I think I’m roughly 90% confident that fewer than ’10 out of 10 statisticians will say the rate is basically flat for the last 10 years’. I am interpreting ‘the rate is flat here’ to mean that the net temperature trend is flat over time, as I believe we’re talking about whether global warming is continuing and not whether global warming is accelerating. (Thought process here: I reckon a randomly selected statistician has at most a 4 in 5 chance of deciding that temperatures have been ‘basically flat’ for the last 10 years’ based on the satellite data. Then the chance of 10 random statisticians all saying temperatures have been flat is 11%, so an 89% chance of at least one of them dissenting.)
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he believes he’s right?
By “having an agenda,” I mean that Nisbett is emphasizing the facts that support a particular point of view and de-emphasizing the facts which undermine that point of view in order to persuade the reader.
So defined, one can ask whether Nisbett has an agenda. Do you have any doubt that Nisbett has an agenda?
I am interpreting ‘the rate is flat here’ to mean that the net temperature trend is flat over time,
So by your definition, the temperature trend is NOT basically flat between 1995 and the present, correct?
By “having an agenda,” I mean that Nisbett is emphasizing the facts that support a particular point of view and de-emphasizing the facts which undermine that point of view in order to persuade the reader.
So defined, one can ask whether Nisbett has an agenda. Do you have any doubt that Nisbett has an agenda?
Not much. I think it is very likely that Nisbett suffers from confirmation bias about as much as everybody else.
So by your definition, the temperature trend is NOT basically flat between 1995 and the present, correct?
Eyeballing it I’d say it’s much more likely that temperatures rose since 1995 than that they stayed flat, so I’d say you’re pretty much correct. I wouldn’t dogmatically say it’s not flat in big capital letters, but I think the rising temperature hypothesis is a lot more likely than the flat temperature hypothesis.
I’d double check my intuition by running a regression, but that’d stack the deck because of autocorrelation, and I can’t remember from the top of my head how to fit a linear model that accounts for that.
The fact that you quote this doesn’t help your credibility
I’m not sure what your point is. My argument does not depend on my credibility.
In any event, do you agree that “journalistic malpractice” works both ways? In other words, if it’s malpractice to claim that there has been no warming since 1995, it’s also malpractice to claim that there has been no cooling since 1998?
I’m not sure what this means. Are you saying that every piece of written material has an agenda behind it as I’ve defined the term?
Not every piece of written material, but I’d bet that almost all lengthy pieces of writing intended to communicate a point to others have an agenda behind them, sure. There’s always a temptation to round the numbers to your advantage, to leave out bits of data that might conflict with your hypothesis, to neglect to mention possible problems with your statistical tests, and so on.
Even ignoring that sort of thing, cognitive biases play an important role. Nisbett presumably had a half-formed opinion of the race and IQ argument even before he started researching it in depth. And that would in turn have affected which bits of relevant evidence got stuck in his mind. And that would in turn have hardened his opinion. You get positive feedbacks that push your opinion away from others that conflict with it. So even if Nisbett were consciously being as honest as possible, he could still be
emphasizing the facts that support a particular point of view and de-emphasizing the facts which undermine that point of view in order to persuade the reader
just because his mental database of facts is going to overrepresent the 1st kind of fact and underrepresent the 2nd—and precisely because of that, he is going to be sure that his point of view is obviously correct, and precisely because of that, he is going to be writing to persuade the reader of it—even though, as far as he knows, he is being completely honest!
but I’d bet that almost all lengthy pieces of writing intended to communicate a point to others have an agenda behind them, sure
Ok, and the stronger the agenda, the more you should trust your common sense over claims made by the person with the agenda.
That’s what he said.
Ok, and presumably what he meant was that any warming which took place between 1995 and the present was less than some statistical minimum threshold. I’m not sophisticated enough to calculate such a limit, but that’s what I meant when I said that temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 years.
Ok, and the stronger the agenda, the more you should trust your common sense over claims made by the person with the agenda.
Cool. I feel more comfortable now that you’ve expressed this in continuous terms. There’s still a catch, though: using your definition of having an agenda, I can’t really tell whether someone has an agenda without also knowing the facts (because ‘having an agenda’ here is being used to mean that someone’s making a slanted presentation of the facts), and if I know the facts already, I have little need for your has-an-agenda heuristic.
Ok, and presumably what he meant was that any warming which took place between 1995 and the present was less than some statistical minimum threshold.
Roughly speaking, I think that’s about right.
I’m not sophisticated enough to calculate such a limit, but that’s what I meant when I said that temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 years.
I think I understand now. Alrighty...yeah, I would suspect that there’s been no statistically significant warming trend in the last 10 years. I would however avoid using phrases like ‘temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 years’ to describe this, as I nonetheless believe that if one considers the last 10 years of records in the context of unambiguous past warming, they are consistent with an ongoing, underlying warming trend.
I can’t really tell whether someone has an agenda without also knowing the facts
I would suggest you practice. It also helps to read people who contradict eachother. It also helps if you learn some of the facts.
I would however avoid using phrases like ‘temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 years’ to describe this, as I nonetheless believe that if one considers the last 10 years of records in the context of unambiguous past warming, they are consistent with an ongoing, underlying warming trend.
Lol, I guess that means American housing prices have been going up the last couple years too.
In any event, I think it’s fair to say that temperatures have been basically flat because it contradicts many of the predictions of the warmists.
I would suggest you practice. It also helps to read people who contradict eachother. It also helps if you learn some of the facts.
I reckon the first two things only help in as much as they help you do the third. Learning the facts is what really matters—and in my experience, once I feel I know enough about an issue to decide who has an agenda (in your sense of the phrase), I typically feel I know enough to make my own judgement of the issue without having to tie my colours to the talking head I like the most.
Lol, I guess that means American housing prices have been going up the last couple years too.
I am not familiar enough with US house prices to be sure, but I suspect that’s a poor analogy to the global warming data.
In any event, I think it’s fair to say that temperatures have been basically flat because it contradicts many of the predictions of the warmists.
Here are two better criteria for judging your statement’s fairness:
Compare the temperature data. It’s quite clear that there’s relatively a lot more noise and external forcing, which makes it harder to see a trend in the data. That’s why it’s reasonable to suppose that past upward trends in temperature are continuing, even though the most recent temperatures look flat in some of the data sets; the greater noise hurts your statistical power to detect a trend, which means that you can get the appearance of no trend whether or not the upward trend is continuing.
Hence why I see your analogy as a poor one: you’re implying that arguing for an ongoing increase in temperature is as silly as arguing for an ongoing increase in house prices, but that ignores the far greater statistical power to detect a change in trend in recent house price data.
And how do I know if the statement is liable to mislead people?
Apply your rough mental model of how other people are likely to interpret your statement to decide whether your statement is likely to direct them to a misleading impression of the data.
For example, if I show someone this graph, it’s fair to say that there’s a significant chance they’ll think it shows that US temperature increase per century has no practical significance. But that would of course be a fallacious inference: the fact that other temperature measurements can vary a lot is logically disconnected from the issue of whether the rise in US temperature has real importance. In that sense the graph is liable to mislead.
That’s why it’s reasonable to suppose that past upward trends in temperature are continuing, even though the most recent temperatures look flat in some of the data sets
It may be reasonable to suppose so, but it doesn’t change the fact that temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 (or 15) years.
In any event, it’s quite possible—even likely—that the upward trend in housing prices is continuing in the same sense you believe that the upward trend in temperatures may be continuing; and that the recent housing bubble is the rough equivalent of an el nino
It may be reasonable to suppose so, but it doesn’t change the fact that temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 (or 15) years.
I don’t believe it is true that ‘temperatures have been basically flat’ for the last 15 years: I see a net gain of 0.1 to 0.2 Kelvin, depending on the data set (HadCRUT3 v. GISTEMP v. UAH v. RSS). And it looks to me like temperatures have only been ‘flat’ for the last 10 years in the sense that a short enough snippet of a noisy time series will always look ‘flat.’
In any event, it’s quite possible—even likely—that the upward trend in housing prices is continuing in the same sense you believe that the upward trend in temperatures may be continuing; and that the recent housing bubble is the rough equivalent of an el nino
And the accompanying crash would be a La Niña? I think the house price boom & crash is a little too big to characterize like that.
I don’t believe it is true that ‘temperatures have been basically flat’ for the last 15 years: I see a net gain of 0.1 to 0.2 Kelvin, depending on the data set (HadCRUT3 v. GISTEMP v. UAH v. RSS).
So the standard is “net gain,” and a net gain greater than (or less than) 0.1 Kelvin means not basically flat?
And it looks to me like temperatures have only been ‘flat’ for the last 10 years in the sense that a short enough snippet of a noisy time series will always look ‘flat.’
That may be true, but so what? characterization of evidence != interpretation of evidence. Agreed?
I think the house price boom & crash is a little too big to characterize like that.
Why not? It’s a short term detour in a larger overall trend. If you happened to buy a house at the top of the market, there is still an excellent chance that some day the market price will exceed your purchase price.
So the standard is “net gain,” and a net gain greater than (or less than) 0.1 Kelvin means not basically flat?
Any net gain (or net loss), however small, means not flat, if you are confident enough that it’s not an artefact or noise. (Adding the adverb ‘basically’ muddies things a bit, because it implies that you’re not interested in small deviations from flatness.) So: am I quite confident that there has been a deviation from flatness since 1995, and that the deviation is neither artefact nor noise? Yes. But you knew that already, so I’ll go deeper.
You earlier referred to the Phil Jones interview where he stated that the warming since 1995 is ‘only just’ statistically insignificant. I don’t know enough about testing autocorrelated time series to check that, but I’m willing to pretty much trust him on this point.
OK, so every so often on Less Wrong you see a snippet of Jaynes or a popular science article presented in the context of a frequentism vs. Bayesianism comparison. I’ve gone to bat before (see that first link’s discussion) to explain why pitting the two against each other seems wrong-minded to me. I’ve yet to see an example where frequentist methods necessarily have to give a different result to Bayesian methods, just by virtue of being frequentist rather than Bayesian. I see the two as two sides of the same coin.
Still, there are certain techniques that are more associated with the frequentist school than the Bayesian. One of them is statistical significance testing. That particular technique gets a lot of heat from statisticians of all sorts (not just Bayesians!), and arguably rightly so. People are liable to equate statistical significance with practical significance, which is simply wrong, and to dogmatically reject any null hypothesis that doesn’t clear a particular p-value bar. On this point, I have to agree with the critics. Far as I can tell, there are too many people who fundamentally misunderstand significance tests, and as someone who does understand them (or I think I do—maybe that’s just the Dunning-Kruger effect talking) and finds them useful, that disappoints me.
In the end, you have to exercise judgment in interpreting significance tests, like any other tool. Just because a test limps over the magic significance level with a p-value of 0.049 doesn’t mean you should immediately shitcan your null hypothesis, and just because your test falls a hair short with an 0.051 p-value doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.
To get more specific, that net warming since 1995 has been ‘just’ statistically insignificant does not mean no warming. It means that under a particular model, the null hypothesis of no overall trend cannot be rejected. It could be because there really is no trend. Or there might be a true trend, but your data are too noisy and too few. Or the test could be cherrypicked. You have to exercise judgment and decide which is most likely. I believe the last two possibilities are most likely: I can see the noise with my own eyes, and apparently 1995 is the earliest year where warming since that year is statistically insignificant, which would be consistent with cherry-picking the year 1995.
Which is why I reject the null hypothesis of no net temperature change since 1995, even though the p-value of Phil Jones’ test is presumably a bit higher than 0.05.
That may be true, but so what? characterization of evidence != interpretation of evidence. Agreed?
They are distinct concepts.
I get the feeling that you think calling the last decade of temperatures ‘flat’ is characterization and not interpretation, and I would disagree. When I say temperatures have risen overall, that’s an interpretation. When you say they have not, that’s an interpretation. Either interpretation is defensible, though I believe mine is more accurate (but of course I would believe that).
Why not? It’s a short term detour in a larger overall trend.
Right, but if you compare the housing price detour to the noise in the house price data, it’s relatively way way bigger than the El Niño deviation compared to the noise in the temperature data.
I pulled the temperature data behind this plot and regressed temperature on year. Then I calculated the standard deviation of the residuals from the start of the time series up to 1998 (when the EN kicked in). The peak in the data (at ‘year’ 1998.08, with a value of 0.6595 degrees) is then 3.9 sigmas above the regression line.
Look back at the home price graph—maybe that particular graph’s been massively smoothed, but the post-peak drop looks like way more than a 4 sigma decline: I’d eyeball it as on the order of 10-20 sigmas—and that’s a big underestimate because the standard deviation is going to be inflated by what looks like a seasonal fluctuation (the yearly-looking spikes). The El Niño is big and bold, no doubt about it, but it’s a puppy compared to the housing pricing crash.
Adding the adverb ‘basically’ muddies things a bit, because it implies that you’re not interested in small deviations from flatness.
Of course it muddies things and we should not be interested in small deviations. That’s the basic point of your argument. The only question is how small is small.
When I say temperatures have risen overall, that’s an interpretation. When you say they have not, that’s an interpretation
Well can you give me an example of a statement about temperature in the last 10 years which is not an “interpretation”?
Right, but if you compare the housing price detour to the noise in the house price data, it’s relatively way way bigger than the El Niño deviation compared to the noise in the temperature data.
The El Niño is big and bold, no doubt about it, but it’s a puppy compared to the housing pricing crash.
So what? In 1998, would it have been wrong to say that global surface temperatures had risen (relatively) rapidly over the previous few years?
Of course it muddies things and we should not be interested in small deviations. That’s the basic point of your argument.
?!
The point I was making in the first 550 words of the grandparent comment is that one shouldn’t automatically disregard a small deviation from flatness merely because it’s (barely) statistically insignificant. I am not sure how you interpreted it to mean that ‘we should not be interested in small deviations.’
Well can you give me an example of a statement about temperature in the last 10 years which is not an “interpretation”?
A statement that’s a few written words or sentences? I doubt it. Trying to summarize a complicated time series in a few words is inevitably going to mean not mentioning some features of the time series, and your editorial judgment of which features not to mention means you’re interpreting it.
So what?
You should know, you asked me ‘Why not?’ in the first place.
In 1998, would it have been wrong to say that global surface temperatures had risen (relatively) rapidly over the previous few years?
Practically, yes, because that claim carries the implication that the El Niño spike is representative of the warming ‘over the previous few years.’
So the standard is “net gain,” and a net gain greater than (or less than) 0.1 Kelvin means not basically flat?
My linear regressions based on NOAA data (I was stupid and lost the citation for where I downloaded it) have 0.005-0.007 K/year since 1880; 0.1 to 0.2 K in a decade is beating the trend.
I took the liberty of downloading the GISTEMP data, which I suspect are very similar to the NOAA data (because the GISTEMP series also starts at 1880, and I dimly remember reading somewhere that the GISS gets land-based temperature data from the NOAA). Regressing anomaly on year I get an 0.00577 K/year increase since 1880, consistent with Robin’s estimate. R tells me the standard error on that estimate is 0.00011 K/year.
However, that standard error estimate should be taken with a pinch of salt for two reasons: the regression’s residuals are correlated, and it is unlikely that a linear model is wholly appropriate because global warming was reduced mid-century by sulphate emissions. Caveat calculator!
(ETA: I just noticed you wrote ‘these,’ so I thought you might be interested in the trend for the past decade as well. Regressing anomaly on year for the past 120 monthly GISTEMP temperature anomalies has a trend of 0.0167 ± 0.0023 K/year, but the same warning about that standard error applies.)
I have no idea. Varying the starting point from ten to thirty years ago with Feb 2010 as the endpoint puts the slope anywhere in the range [-0.0001,0.2], so it must be fairly large on the scale of a decade.
Yes, but in that case you aren’t looking at the data that Nisbett referred to. As cupholder pointed out
Clicking on the ‘White-Black Gap’ button, and then on the ‘Age 17’ tab (as Nisbett refers to 12th graders, so I am guessing that is what he and you are talking about...?)
But Nisbett is quoting from a study “which found improvement on almost all tests for African American 12th graders”. That study may not even have contained the data on 9-year-olds. You can ask “Why didn’t that study include that data?”, well because they were comparing data for 12th graders.
Actually, it’s not clear to me what study he is talking about. Here’s what he says:
The largest study, conducted by the NAEP, indicated that, if trends were to continue, the gap in reading scores would be eliminated in approximately 25 years and the gap in science scores in approximately 75 years.
So I went to the NAEP web site and looked at the very first graph I saw. What study do you think he is referring to?
Hedges and Nowell (1998) found improvement on almost all tests for African American 12th graders compared with other 12th graders over the period 1965– 1994. The best estimates in terms of the stability the scores provide, and in terms of their correlations with IQ, are in the form of composites, for example, reading + vocabulary + mathematics for the EEO survey. The Black–White gap
on these composites over the period decreased on average by 0.13 standard
deviation per decade, yielding an estimate of a reduction of the gap by around
0.39 standard deviation over the period. The largest study, conducted by the
NAEP, indicated that, if trends were to continue, the gap in reading scores would
be eliminated in approximately 25 years and the gap in science scores in approximately 75 years.
I take this to say that Hedges and Nowell examined lots of test results for African Amercicans 12th graders from 1965-1994. The test with the largest sample was the NAEP test. Since Hedges and Nowell were looking at 12th graders Nisbett is probably talking about the 17-year-olds.
I could be wrong. In any case, the trends have changed since 1994 so obviously the predictions don’t hold.
This all seems pretty beside the point to me since the evidence that really matters is the adoption and skin tone studies. The other thing that becomes obvious is that there just isn’t nearly enough data—all the studies are decades old presumably because 1975 was the last time you could get grant money to study the issue. There certainly isn’t enough to conclude, as you did, that there is obviously a genetic component.
The test with the largest sample was the NAEP test
Well Nisbett refers to a “study” by the NAEP.
This all seems pretty beside the point to me since the evidence that really matters is the adoption and skin tone studies.
That may be so, but I intentionally chose to run down data from the very first part of the paper so that nobody could accuse me of nitpicking or cherrypicking.
There certainly isn’t enough to conclude, as you did, that there is obviously a genetic component
That’s only if you feel you need to rely on scientific studies to reach conclusions. Some things don’t require such a study.
That’s only if you feel you need to rely on scientific studies to reach conclusions. Some things don’t require such a study.
Yes, but you have to be super careful when deciding which things need scientific studies.
A few years ago I would’ve said women were so much more chatty than men—and that the difference in chattiness was so obvious—that it would be a waste of time to check it out scientifically. But sometimes, when you check things out systematically, you’re surprised. I think the argument about blacks, whites and IQ is a bit like that, although that argument is more about the cause of the differences and not their mere existence.
Participants were assigned conversational partners at random, and asked to talk for up to ten minutes on one of forty topics
I would never have predicted that women would be more chatty in such a test. I would have predicted that men would talk more on a supplied topic. I believed, and still believe that women are more chatty under the commonly intended meaning of ‘chatty’. A more relevant test:
Asign random pairs of people and send them on a 5 hour hike together. Count words.
I would expect female pairs to say more words than the male pairs. Mixed pairings I would find somewhat more difficult to predict due to possible interference from courtship protocols.
I have my doubts about how strongly that particular test would correlate with what I understand by ‘chatty’. It’s a pretty artificial setup. When I think about it I have a pretty fuzzy idea of what ‘chatty’ means though. I would still say women are more chatty than men but that is partly because some part of the fuzzy definition involves ‘the type of small talk that women tend to engage in more than men’ rather than some idea of total word volume.
I imagine it’s less widespread a belief than before the 80s, but it’s just one of those things you get by osmosis from the broader culture when you’re young. It’s part of the stereotypes there are about the sexes: women can’t drive, men won’t ask for directions when they’re lost, blah blah blah.
Yes, but you have to be super careful when deciding which things need scientific studies.
I would say “reasonably careful” not “super careful.” One thing I’ve noticed about the race and intelligence debate is that many people apply an extremely heightened standard of skepticism to the question.
By analogy, suppose we were debating the existence of God. There may very well be a few scientific studies out there which lend some degree of support to the theistic point of view. Further, there probably has not been a lot of scientific research into the subject. So one could take the “super careful” approach and say that the jury is still out on the subject. But that’s silly. That’s just exaggerated skepticism on the part of folks who don’t like a particular conclusion.
For those of us who do believe in God but aspire to rationality, the best we can do is to concede there’s a contradiction there.
When I suggested being ‘super careful’ I meant being super careful about deciding which things are so obvious as to not need systematic debate and study in the first place, not about deciding how skeptical to be of certain ‘sides’ or conclusions in a debate.
When I suggested being ‘super careful’ I meant being super careful about deciding which things are so obvious as to not need systematic debate and study in the first place, not about deciding how skeptical to be of certain ‘sides’ or conclusions in a debate.
I’m not sure what you mean by “systematic debate and study,” but assuming it means the same thing as “scientific studies,” it seems to me it amounts to basically the same thing. At least in this case.
I’ll try and clarify with the non-race and IQ related example that first put the idea into my head: gravity. The idea of things falling to the floor is so obvious to me, and agrees so well with my common sense, that I would not even bother to debate somebody who wanted to argue that things don’t fall to the floor. That’s the behaviour I’m saying it’s a good idea to be super careful about: rejecting challenges to your existing view out of hand.
Stepping back to the race and IQ argument, I’m saying that I would exercise a lot of care before I put the argument into the ‘no need to even bother debating it’ box. Having entered into the debate, though, I would be content to apply my ordinary standards of evidence to the different ‘sides’ in the debate. I mean the ‘super careful’ warning to apply pre-debate, not during the debate.
I’m still waiting for y’all to agree on what God is so I can decide. Everyone seems to have a different idea of the bugger. In the meantime I’ll carry on spending brain energy on less fuzzy things, like race and IQ and global warming.
For purposes of this discussion, we can define God as a supernatural being who who more or less did the acts ascribed to Him in the Hebrew Bible. e.g. creating the Earth, and so on. In other words, the God of Abraham.
I take it you are agnostic about the existence of the God of Abraham?
Upvoted for interestingness, but that definition still leaves no room for supernatural beings as far as I’m concerned (assuming I’m interpreting Carrier’s post correctly).
That’s because I don’t draw the distinction between minds and mental things and the ‘nonmental’ that Carrier does—I’ve effectively ruled out the supernatural by fiat because I treat it as axiomatic that the mental is just a kind of physical.
Kinda, though I try to acknowledge that different people mean different things by ‘God.’ For example, some people equate God with love. If you do that God obviously exists.
If God really were love, praying would be a complete waste of time.
Why? The placebo effect and other mindhacks apply to any sort of ritual or ‘magic’. If you accept this, then worshipping ‘love’ or ‘warfare’ or other god-forms is not a waste of time at all—the purpose and effect of prayer need not involve anything supernatural.
That … is a good point, actually. It doesn’t affect my argument—the one I elaborated with my Thom Yorke example—but it does complicate the situation in ways which should be acknowledged.
I tried probing deeper (just out of curiosity) the first few times I was told ‘God is love/an energy/kindness/a force’, but found that my conversant usually had difficulty elaborating beyond the initial statement. There seemed to be some extra, hard to articulate component to what they thought but they were usually unwilling and/or unable to communicate it to me.
After a time I decided to just politely go ‘Hmmmm, I see’ and try changing the subject whenever someone equated God with something mundane in conversation. I think I must have started doing that mentally as well—hence why I take the statement at face value when I hear it.
That matches my experience as well—I think it is a necessarily supernatural description in the Carrier sense of the word, though, if it is to be taken at face value. It’s not like saying “God is Thom Yorke” (to pick the first name that comes to mind—I don’t even know who Thom Yorke is), and then cheerfully conceding that God is not, in fact, omnipotent or omniscient, etc. - the God-is-Love god still has the usual properties, just (or not “just”, depending) also that description.
Well, that might make for more interesting Gospels at least:
My brethren, be not anxious that Thom be absent or that this not come to pass (as in the Book of Kid A, Track 4); for recall as Thom sayeth, “there is nothing to fear, nothing to doubt” (Amnesiac, 2)— verily, in an interstellar burst he shall be back to save the universe (OK Computer, 1). Thou mayst not see him in the world as it is, this gunboat in a sea of fear (The Bends, 2), for Thom doth not belong here (Pablo Honey, 2).
Repent of your sins, lest you go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking (In Rainbows, 3); steer away from those rocks of evil, or thou shalt be a walking disaster (Hail to the Thief, 9). Therefore immerse your soul in love (The Bends, 12) with all your will, for the best thou can is good enough (Kid A, 6) and Thom shalt see thee in the next life (Kid A, 10).
I suspect the original Gospels were similarly interesting to the early Christians—it’s just that we (most of us, anyway) don’t get the in-jokes any more.
Actually, I favor the “response to the Euthyphro Dilemma” theory—if God is Good, then what God loves must be Good by definition, not by contrivance, and the dilemma collapses.
That is, if you ignore the contrivance that is “God is Good”.
As I understand it, “goodness” is being used in a somewhat confusing way there, referring to not only outcomes in the world and the actions which lead to those outcomes, but also preferences or personality traits which lead to those actions. In other words, there is a set of mental qualities which results in preferable outcomes (good) and a set which does not (evil); God has all of the former qualities and none of the latter, therefore similarity to God can be taken as evidence of goodness and vice-versa.
The main practical difference from Friendly AI is that God is presumed to already exist.
More rigorously, the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” must be in the map, not in the territory. As Aleister Crowley put it in his Book of Lies:
“Explain this happening!”
“It must have a natural cause!” }____Let these two asses be set to grind corn.
“It must have a supernatural cause!” }
Ok, in that case just take the supernatural part out of the definition. Define God as some entity who did essentially what is ascribed to God in the Hebrew Bible. i.e. He created the Heavens and the Earth, etc.
I don’t have a paper copy of the Bible so I used this. I tried to read it from the beginning, but it didn’t make any sense. At first I thought ‘God’ must have been Hebrew for ‘Big Bang,’ but that didn’t fit. I can’t really work out what this ‘God’ would even be if it existed—it’s like trying to deduce what the Jabberwock is. So I guess God is about as likely to exist as slithy toves.
About Hebrew Bible God? Of course! Unless you can think of some sensible way to interpret Genesis (and the rest of it) that hasn’t occurred to me and lets you salvage a God.
Do you understand that in the West, when people say they believe in God, they are normally referring to the God of Abraham?
That is what I thought when I was younger. In practice I’ve found that when talking to people in depth about their idea of God, they often have a slightly different idea of what God is supposed to be than other people I’ve spoken to.
And do you agree that there exists weak evidence for the existence of God?
Yes: a lot of people claim to have experienced God directly, which is weak evidence for God’s existence. (Assuming they’re all talking about essentially the same thing when they say ‘God,’ anyway.)
Yes: a lot of people claim to have experienced God directly
Sure; also there is hearsay documentary evidence (the Bible) and apparently even some scientific studies which supposedly demonstrate the power of prayer.
Rejecting an interpretation of the evidence != rejecting evidence.
(Incidentally, I tried pulling up meta-analyses on the effect of prayer and found this Cochrane meta-analysis which finds no consistent effect of being prayed for on ill health.)
Rejecting an interpretation of the evidence != rejecting evidence.
:shrug: By what standard do you evaluate this evidence so as to reach your atheistic conclusion notwithstanding this evidence for the existence of God?
The same standard I use to reach an a-homeopathic conclusion notwithstanding the evidence for homeopathy working, or an a-alien-abduction conclusion notwithstanding the evidence for people being beamed up and anally probed by aliens.
Namely, can I fit the idea of God existing/homeopathy working/alien abduction into my broader understanding of the world, or would it require overturning practically my whole understanding of how reality works?
On the contrary, it is quite possible that there could be evidence that would convince me of either of those things. It is just that the evidence would have to be strong enough to go head-to-head with basic physics. If it could somehow be demonstrated that Avogadro’s number were 300 orders of magnitude too tiny, and that molecules were a googol times smaller than we thought, and could explain why our earlier experiments had led us to our original estimates of Avogadro’s number and molecular sizes, then that would tend make the effectiveness of homeopathy (more) plausible.
My estimate of the probability of homeopathy working and the current laws of physics being very different would have to be of similar order to my estimate of the probability of the current laws of physics being correct.
And how do you come up with your probability estimates in a situation like this? Do you rely on your general knowledge and common sense? Do you have some algorithm you follow?
No, I don’t have a strict algorithm I follow in situations like this. What I actually do is probably more like this:
do some initial reading to get an idea of the basic plausibility of the hypothesis based on my background knowledge
let the hypothesis bounce around my mind for a while
try to spell out to myself the resulting gut feeling for the hypothesis’ probability
check that rough estimate for any gaping flaws
if that rough estimate is really low, reject the hypothesis as Too Unlikely To Debate for the time being (remember that ‘super careful’ warning I made a few posts up? This is where it applies)
if the rough estimate is instead very high, accept the hypothesis as Too Likely To Debate for the time being
if the probability estimate is more middling, and the hypothesis’ truthiness is important to me, gather more data and try to hone my hunch for the hypothesis’ probability
Fine, and using a similar method of estimating probabilities based on my knowledge, common sense, etc., I am satisfied that the difference in cognitive performance between blacks and whites results in large part from genetic differences.
In the same way that you are reasonably confident that God does not exist despite evidence to the contrary.
...using a similar method of estimating probabilities based on my knowledge, common sense, etc., I am satisfied that...
This statement is roughly equivalent to “My opinions on topic X are soundly arrived at”. Show, don’t tell.
In the instance, the blog where you said you were going to publish “evidence and arguments” in support of the above view has, to a first approximation, zero useful or interesting content at this time. Meanwhile you have wasted the time and attention of many LW readers as you submitted cupholder to an interrogation that would have tried anyone’s patience.
This statement is roughly equivalent to “My opinions on topic X are soundly arrived at”.
Perhaps, but I set forth the basis of my reasoning in a blog post elsewhere. So I did more than simply assert a conclusion.
Since this branch of the discussion has fallen below the comment threshhold, I am happy to discuss things here.
In any event, would you apply the same criticism to cupholder’s atheism?
to a first approximation, zero useful or interesting content at this time
If you believe that what I stated was not useful or interesting, then you should not mind stipulating for the sake of argument that the facts I state there are correct. Agreed?
Meanwhile you have wasted the time and attention of many LW readers as you submitted cupholder to an interrogation that would have tried anyone’s patience.
Unfortunately cupholder was rather evasive in our discussion. That’s his fault not mine.
If you felt my answers to your questions were unsatisfactory, it would have been more helpful to have made that more explicit at the time, instead of working through your long-winded Socratic dialogue and taking an unsubstantiated potshot at me.
Me: Sure; also there is hearsay documentary evidence (the Bible) and apparently even some scientific studies which supposedly demonstrate the power of prayer.
But by what standard do you reject such evidence?
You: Rejecting an interpretation of the evidence != rejecting evidence
Me: :shrug: By what standard do you evaluate this evidence so as to reach your atheistic conclusion notwithstanding this evidence for the existence of God?
It’s pretty obvious in this context what it means to “reject evidence,” but you chose an interpretation which let you avoid the question. i.e. you were evasive.
Anyway, I didn’t make an issue out of your evasiveness until somebody made an issue out of the length of our exchange.
It’s pretty obvious in this context what it means to “reject evidence,”
Indeed, and that context happens to include this question preceding the first one you quoted there:
And do you agree that there exists weak evidence for the existence of God?
which implies that you thought there was a significant chance that I didn’t believe there was evidence of God. (Otherwise, why would you have bothered asking?) So when you subsequently implied that I ‘reject such evidence’ of God, it was quite reasonable to interpret it as literally just that—rejecting the evidence qua evidence—because you had just implied that you were open to the possibility that I denied evidence of God in general.
Anyway, I didn’t make an issue out of your evasiveness until somebody made an issue out of the length of our exchange.
which implies that you thought there was a significant chance that I didn’t believe there was evidence of God. (Otherwise, why would you have bothered asking?) So when you subsequently implied that I ‘reject such evidence’ of God, it was quite reasonable to interpret it as literally just that—rejecting the evidence qua evidence—because you had just implied that you were open to the possibility that I denied evidence of God in general.
Lol, you are being silly. We had both agreed that the evidence exists and then I asked why you rejected it. It was completely obvious what I meant.
Lol, you are being silly. We had both agreed that the evidence exists and then I asked why you rejected it.
You seem to be writing as if acknowledging the existence of evidence and rejecting evidence are mutually exclusive. Perhaps that is how you understand acknowledging that evidence exists v. rejecting evidence, but that’s a new understanding to me.
I’m not asserting that you asked me if I believed there was no evidence of God (which is the ~X you have in mind, as far as I can tell). I’m asserting that you asked me whether I rejected evidence of God.
A second thing. It’s plain to me that at this point this argument is capable of going around in circles forever (if it hasn’t gone into a full-on death spiral already), and I’m not interested in engaging you on this point indefinitely. I’m not going to continue this subthread after this comment.
I’m not asserting that you asked me if I believed there was no evidence of God (which is the ~X you have in mind, as far as I can tell). I’m asserting that you asked me whether I rejected evidence of God.
But according to you, I implied that rejecting evidence of God excludes the possibility of acknowledging the existence of that evidence.
However I made no such implication.
and I’m not interested in engaging you on this point indefinitely. I’m not going to continue this subthread after this comment.
That’s fine . . . I don’t engage with people who strawman me.
I’m not. This style of argumentation is ineffective and wasteful of people’s time, and I’m unhappy, bordering on angry, that it has gone on that long. I prefer to let this emotion find a productive outlet, namely a top-level post to put a name to the pattern I prefer, so as to encourage more useful discussions in future.
Unfortunately cupholder was rather evasive in our discussion
Would you like to see some evidence? I’m happy to provide it.
Blame. Irrelevant to truth-seeking.
If blame is irrelevant to truth-seeking, then why are you accusing me (and not cupholder) of “wasting time and attention”?
Anyway, please answer my questions:
(1) Would you apply the same criticism to cupholder’s atheism?
(2) If you believe that what I stated was not useful or interesting, then you should not mind stipulating for the sake of argument that the facts I state there are correct. Agreed?
If you actually have evidence, simply lay it out as soon as it might be relevant.
I disagree with this. It takes time and energy to gather evidence. I don’t care to spend my time and energy digging up evidence unless somebody seriously throws down the gauntlet. Just stating “Claim. Unsupported by evidence” -- without indicating an interest in engaging—is not enough for me. Besides, it would have been easy enough for the poster to come back and say “yes, show me a quote please.”
I would say that you are presenting what’s known as a “false dilemma,” i.e. your statement assumes that there are only two possibilities: either (1) I have the evidence in which case it costs me nothing to present it; or (2) I don’t in which case it is dishonest for me to offer to present evidence.
Of course there is another possibility, which is that I am reasonably confident I can present the evidence, but it will take me time and energy to gather and present it.
For example, suppose I bought a toaster a month ago; it breaks; I call up the store to get it fixed; and the store manager says “We can’t help you since you aren’t the original purchaser.” Before I spend 20 minutes finding the credit card receipt, I’m going to ask the guy “Would you like to see proof that I bought the toaster?”
If you don’t yet have evidence, it’s not dishonest to offer to find and present it, but it is dishonest to claim that you already have it, since by making that claim you’re claiming something that’s not true—namely that you have already confirmed that the evidence exists.
Is it dishonest to offer to present evidence when you are confident you can gather it?
For example, in the toaster scenario, is it dishonest to offer to produce proof that you bought the toaster? (Assume for the sake of argument that you save all of your receipts religiously and you are quite confident that you can produce the receipt if you are willing to take 20 minutes to rummage through your old receipts.)
Is it dishonest to offer to present evidence when you are confident you can gather it?
If you offer it in such a way as to assert that you already have it, yes.
If I know that someone has a certain amount of evidence for a certain thing, then seeing that evidence myself doesn’t tell me much—knowing that the evidence exists is almost as good as gathering it myself. (This is what makes scientific studies work, so that people don’t have to test every theory by themselves.) But knowing that someone thinks that a certain amount of evidence exists for a certain thing is much weaker, and actually seeing the evidence in this case tells me much more, because it’s not particularly unusual for people to be wrong about this kind of thing, even when they claim to be certain. (Ironically, while I remember seeing a post on here that mentioned that when people were asked to give several 90%-likely predictions most of them managed to do no better than 30% correct, I can’t find it, so, case in point, I guess.)
toaster scenario
I don’t think this is an accurate metaphor; human brains don’t work well enough for us to be that confident in most situations.
If you offer it in such a way as to assert that you already have it, yes
I don’t understand what you mean by “already have it.” If I know that I can pull the evidence up on my computer screen with about 60 seconds of work, do I “have” it? If the evidence is stored my hard drive, do I “have” it? If the evidence is on a web site which is publicly accessible, do I “have” it?
I don’t think this is an accurate metaphor; human brains don’t work well enough for us to be that confident in most situations
It sounds like your answer to my question is “no,” i.e. it would not be dishonest to offer to produce a receipt but that the example I described is extremely rare and non-representative. Do I understand you correctly?
If I know that I can pull the evidence up on my computer screen with about 60 seconds of work, do I “have” it?
If you spend more time arguing about definitions than it would take to present your facts and settle the original point, that constitutes evidence that your motive has little or nothing to do with the pursuit of mutual understanding.
Please either present the evidence you originally offered w/r/t the correlation between race and IQ, or desist in your protestations.
If you spend more time arguing about definitions than it would take to present your facts and settle the original point, that constitutes evidence that your motive has little or nothing to do with the pursuit of mutual understanding.
Before you go attacking my motives, maybe it would make sense to you to explain why you took us into meta-debate territory. You could have easily said something like this:
Brazil84, I think you are unreasonably standing on ceremony by offering to produce evidence rather than just doing it. However, rather than debate over whether that was appropriate or not, please just produce the evidence you offered to produce.
And yet you chose not to, instead launching a meta debate (actually a meta-meta debate). If anyone’s motives are suspect, it’s yours.
Please either present the evidence you originally offered w/r/t the correlation between race and IQ, or desist in your protestations.
Lol, the evidence I offered to produce was that a certain poster was being evasive. Yes, that’s right—you started a meta-meta-debate.
As far as race and IQ goes, I laid out my case on my blog post. You are free read it carefully and then come back if you want evidence or other support for any aspect of it.
I have read the post in question. The heart of your argument seems to be
In other words, you see it pretty much everywhere in the United States and the rest of the world; further, various attempts to eliminate this gap have failed. This is exactly what one would expect to happen if the difference were largely genetic in origin.
Could you please provide some citations, with actual numbers, for “pretty much everywhere” and “various attempts,” including at least one study more recent than… let’s say 1987?
I am seriously skeptical that there is such a difference “pretty much everywhere,” that is, without variance along geographical, political, and economic lines.
“Various attempts have failed” taken literally means almost nothing; I am seriously skeptical that the gap has never been reduced as the result of any deliberate intervention.
I am seriously skeptical that there is such a difference “pretty much everywhere,” that is, without variance along geographical, political, and economic lines.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. Of course there is variance in cognitive abilities (as well as differences in the size of the black/white gap) along geographical, political, and economic lines. And I am not claiming otherwise.
I am seriously skeptical that the gap has never been reduced as the result of any deliberate intervention
Well are you seriously skeptical that the gap has never been substantially eliminated?
An attempt to eliminate the gap could be considered successful in the long term if it resulted in consistent, cumulative reductions in the gap over time, without (yet) eliminating the gap outright. It’s cold comfort, like a cancer patient considered ‘cured’ because they died of something else first, but still worthy of recognition.
And I am not claiming otherwise.
Then please either concede the point that the intelligence gap might be entirely explained by such factors, or provide a more detailed analysis of why it cannot be. For example, how much of the gap is due to differing economic opportunities, and corresponding issues of early childhood nutrition and education, resulting from discriminatory policies that were still legally enforced as of less than fifty years ago?
An attempt to eliminate the gap could be considered successful in the long term if it resulted in consistent, cumulative reductions in the gap over time, without (yet) eliminating the gap outright. It’s cold comfort, like a cancer patient considered ‘cured’ because they died of something else first, but still worthy of recognition.
Well maybe so, but the question is what exactly you are seriously skeptical of. It sounds like you are not seriously skeptical of the claim that the black/white gap has never been substantially eliminated. Do I understand you correctly?
Then please either concede the point that the intelligence gap might be entirely explained by such factors, or provide a more detailed analysis of why it cannot be.
I address that in my blog post. And it sounds like you are not seriously skeptical of the claim that the black/white gap exists pretty much everywhere, you just dispute that it’s the same everywhere and you assert that other factors besides race have a general impact on cognitive abilities. Did I understand you correctly?
I disagree with you on points of fact (namely the causal mechanism behind a difference in intelligence between two subgroups of H. sapiens) about which you claim to have as-yet-unrevealed evidence. I will reply to you no further until you provide that evidence, preferably in the form of a peer-reviewed study published more recently than 1987 Q 4 conclusively supporting your hypothesis.
Furthermore, if you persist in dodging the question and playing games with ‘obviousness,’ I will take that as a sign of bad faith on your part, an attempt to manipulate me into saying something embarrassing.
:shrug: All I did was ask you simple questions so that I could understand exactly what it is you claim to be skeptical of.
I’m not going to waste time digging up citations for things which you don’t seriously dispute.
Furthermore, if you persist in dodging the question and playing games with ’obviousness,
You are the one who is dodging questions.
I asked you two simple, reasonable yes or no questions in good faith so that I could understand your position. You ignored both of them.
Debating with me is not about playing “hide the ball” Before I gather evidence, I want to know exactly where we agree and disagree. You refuse to tell me. So be it.
ETA: By the way, it’s possible to be reasonably confident of various generalizations about human groups even without formal, peer-reviewed studies. I think this is pretty obvious, but I can give examples if anyone wants.
Lol, the evidence I offered to produce was that a certain poster was being evasive. Yes, that’s right—you started a meta-meta-debate.
If the readers can’t understand what you’re referring to, the burden is on you to write more clearly. Furthermore, I object to your use of the word “Lol” in this context.
If the readers can’t understand what you’re referring to, the burden is on you to write more clearly.
I see you cannot resist meta-debate.
Anyway, I would say it depends on how much effort and care those readers put into understanding. To any reasonable person, it was clear what I was referring to.
If you have already gathered the necessary evidence, present it without this teasing preamble; if not, admit your ignorance and lay out the probable search costs.
I think that when I asked “would you like to see some evidence,” the reasonable interpretation is that I can gather and present the evidence with a small but non-zero amount of effort.
However, if you did not understand my comment that way, that’s what I meant.
And again, it would have been easy enough for the other poster to say “Yes, I am skeptical of your claim and would like to see the evidence.” Since he didn’t do it, I infer that he doesn’t want to invest any further energy in the interaction. Which is fine, but if he doesn’t want to invest further energy, I don’t want to either.
Unfortunately cupholder was rather evasive in our discussion. That’s his fault not mine.
No, you were aggressive and rude in the discussion. You have demanded a detailed answer while your questions weren’t clear, and in repeated queries you didn’t even try to explain what sort of answer you want. That all only to allow yourself to reply “well, I use the same standards”.
Your debating style resembles more an interrogation than a friendly discussion, and this I consider rude, but it may be only my personal feeling.
More importantly, you deliberately derailed the debate about racial differences in IQ asking about cupholder’s religious beliefs, while being apparently not interested in the question. It seemed to me that the purpose of the long debate was only to prepare positions for your final argument again about racial differences in IQ. This is also on my list of rude behaviour. I don’t like people asking questions in order to show that the opponent can’t answer appropriately.
If I ask a question and am not satisfied with the answer, the default is to suppose that the other person didn’t understood properly the question and my job is to explain it, or possibly give some motivation for it. Repeating the same question with only minimal alterations I consider aggresive. Want a quote?
But by what standard do you reject such evidence? 09:04:15AM
By what standard do you evaluate this evidence so as to reach your atheistic conclusion notwithstanding this evidence for the existence of God? 12:21:53PM
And by what standard would you decide whether the evidence is sufficiently strong? 04:21:39PM
I understand that you interpret it as a result of evasiveness of your opponent, but I simply disagree here. Cupholder has given two answers
Namely, can I fit the idea of God existing/homeopathy working/alien abduction into my broader understanding of the world, or would it require overturning practically my whole understanding of how reality works?
It is just that the evidence would have to be strong enough to go head-to-head with basic physics.
which I find quite appropriate given your question. If you don’t, you should explain the question in more detail, because it is unclear. You have basically asked “what’s your epistemology”, itself a fine question, but full answer could fill a book. So either you wanted some specific answer, and the question was not clear—you should have asked more specifically. Or you didn’t want a specific answer, and since I don’t think you expected cupholder to explain his rationality in full detail, I must conclude that the question was merely rhetorical, which brings me back to rudeness.
More importantly, you deliberately derailed the debate about racial differences in IQ asking about cupholder’s religious beliefs, while being apparently not interested in the question. It seemed to me that the purpose of the long debate was only to prepare positions for your final argument again about racial differences in IQ.
Well, the atheism/theism issue is a decent example of a situation where it’s possible to be reasonably confident in a position without exhaustive scientific studies of the matter. And indeed, even if there are scientific studies going against your position.
I understand that you interpret it as a result of evasiveness of your opponent, but I simply disagree here.
As noted above, cupholder clearly chose an unreasonable interpretation of my question.
If you don’t, you should explain the question in more detail, because it is unclear.
What exactly is the question I asked which is unclear?
Well, the atheism/theism issue is a decent example of a situation where it’s possible to be reasonably confident in a position without exhaustive scientific studies of the matter. And indeed, even if there are scientific studies going against your position.
Agreed, but I don’t understand the relevance.
As noted above, cupholder clearly chose an unreasonable interpretation of my question.
I found all his interpretations (or what I think to be his interpretations) quite natural. Clearly we have conflicting intuitions. What interpretation did you have in mind, i.e. what type of answer you have expected?
What exactly is the question I asked which is unclear?
It is too general to be answered in a concise comment. Therefore, when replying one has to either choose one particular aspect or be very vague.
As I recall, that’s one of the issues which was under discussion.
I found all his interpretations (or what I think to be his interpretations) quite natural. Clearly we have conflicting intuitions. What interpretation did you have in mind,
I claim that the two questions I quoted myself asking are essentially the same question:
So “reject the evidence” can mean 1) deny that the evidence exists and 2) not consider the evidence convincing. You find the interpretation 2) obvious and 1) unreasonable in the given context. Am I right? If so, well, after thinking about it for a while I admit that 2) is a lot better interpretation, but nevertheless I wouldn’t call the other one unreasonable, nor I suspect cupholder of deliberate misinterpretation; people sometimes interpret others wrongly.
Which question are you talking about?
The question by what standard you reject the evidence for the existence of God?
So “reject the evidence” can mean 1) deny that the evidence exists and 2) not consider the evidence convincing. You find the interpretation 2) obvious and 1) unreasonable in the given context. Am I right?
Pretty much yes.
If so, well, after thinking about it for a while I admit that 2) is a lot better interpretation, but nevertheless I wouldn’t call the other one unreasonable, nor I suspect cupholder of deliberate misinterpretation; people sometimes interpret others wrongly.
I disagree, but at a minimum, it was hardly unreasonable for me to rephrase the question.
the atheism/theism issue is a decent example of a situation where it’s possible to be reasonably confident in a position without exhaustive scientific studies
On the contrary; many people consider the issue settled because all major scientific debates in history, bar none, have ended up weighing against the notion of a personal God who takes an interest in and intervenes in human affairs.
(It is, rather, the persistence of the myth, and its influence on public affairs, that seems to demand scientific scrutiny!)
Yes. They are a) necessary and b) already done. (The “question” I have in mind is a specific one, that of a personal God who, etc. as stated above.)
Prior to, say, the invention of writing, it would perhaps have been legitimate to consider the existence of a personal God (or gods) an open question, susceptible of being settled by investigation. In fact under a hypothesis like Julian Jaynes’ humans about 3000 years ago might have had overwhelming evidence that Gods existed… yet they’d still have been mistaken about that.
In fact under a hypothesis like Julian Jaynes’ humans about 3000 years ago might have had overwhelming evidence that Gods existed… yet they’d still have been mistaken about that.
Discovering this hypothesis makes reading this thread worthwhile. I’m shocked I hadn’t heard of it before. Maybe the coolest, most bizarre yet plausible idea I have heard in the last two years. Just hearing it (not even believing it) modifies my worldview. Have you or anyone else read the book? Recommended?
I’ve read the book, which was mentioned favorably in Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and forms part of the backstory to Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Curiosity compelled me to look further.
My level of understanding of the book’s thesis is mostly level-0, i.e. there is a “bicamerality” password but I’d have to reread the book to reacquaint myself with its precise predictions, and I’d be hard pressed to reconstruct the theory myself.
I do have a few pieces of understanding which seem level-2-ish; for instance, the hypothesis accounts for the feeling that a lot of my thinking is internal soliloquy. Also, the idea that consciousness, like love, could in large part be a “memetic” and collective construct (I use the term “meme” evocatively rather than rigorously) somehow appeals to me.
I’d recommend you read it if only for the pleasure of having one more person to discuss it with. I may have to reread it in that case.
It would be futile to try and pinpoint the first chronologically, but for the one that most pointedly refuted a previously established truth, namely that “God made Man in His image”, I’d start with Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Though, actually, Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is probably a better starting point, for being a gloss on Darwin.
You should know, before you ask your next pseudo-Socratic question: given that you seem intent on sticking to that style of “argumentation”, I’m going to take your advice and not engage you anymore.
It would be futile to try and pinpoint the first chronologically,
Ok, then how about an early one then.
but for the one that most pointedly refuted a previously established truth, namely that “God made Man in His image”, I’d start with Darwin’s Origin of Species.
So before the 19th century a rationalist could not reasonably conclude that the atheistic position is correct?
Do you really take this to be a reasonable interpretation / inference based on what Morendil said?
Absolutely. The other poster claimed, in essence, that scientific studies are necessary to reach the atheistic conclusion. The implication is that before such studies were done, one could not reach that conclusion.
To be honest, before Darwin, the Argument from Design was a pretty good reason to be a theist. (And I got this from the aforementioned Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.)
Yes, that’s a problem, but I don’t think it’s enough to make Deism ridiculous. Darwin was fortunate enough to find a “designer” that can exist without requiring a designer of its own, basically settling the question.
In the same way that you are reasonably confident that God does not exist despite evidence to the contrary.
The existence of God has probably the lowest prior probability of any hypothesis ever seriously considered by humans. Further**, any evidence in favor of theism has been swamped by opposing evidence: evil, scientific explanations for nearly every phenomena previously attributed to God, evidence human brains are innately susceptible to believing in gods absent good evidence (and subsequent altering of the God hypothesis to account for the new evidence).
In contrast the hypothesis that the race iq gap is entirely or close to entirely environmental has a prior around .5 (lots of human differences are explained by environmental factors and lots are explained by genetics). What we have to update on consists of a handful of studies, several of which contradict each other and none of which have come close to controlling the relevant factors. We have good evidence the gap has shrunk since the Civil Rights movement, the taboo of overt racism and beneficial developments in African American social and economic position. Then there is some evidence the gap shrinks further when black children are raised by white families. There is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone. Mainstream science either holds that there is no genetic component or that the question is unresolved. Those who believe there is a genetic component will say that political correctness and egalitarianism mean that mainstream science would ignore evidence in favor of their position. Those who do not believe there is a genetic component will say that those who do are just trying to justify their racism. On balance, I update slightly in favor of the environmental hypothesis but there is enough uncertainty that the question needs more studying if we decide we care about it (I’m not sure we should).
The two cases aren’t even roughly comparable.
Now for the hundredth time, if you would like to share the knowledge that we don’t have that makes you so confident you are welcome to. Persisting in arguing without presenting such evidence is trollish and honestly, probably suggests to some that you don’t share their commitment to egalitarianism.
There is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone.
That’s not true at all. There is overwhelming evidence that performance on IQ tests is hugely correlated with “race”, which basically implies skin tone. Blacks, as a group, score 10-15 points below whites (almost a standard deviation), and (some) Asians and Jews are about half a deviation above whites.
The controversy is not whether there is correlation. The controversy is over the casual explanation. How much of this observed difference is due to genetics, how much due to environment, and how much due to the structure of standard IQ tests?
Mainstream science either holds that there is no genetic component or that the question is unresolved.
Just to clarify: the question is whether there is a genetic component to the observed difference in black/white (and other racial) group IQ scores.
There is clearly a genetic component to individual IQ scores.
This varies based on wealth. Among poor/impoverished peoples, variance in IQ scores is something like 60-90% due to environmental factors (like nutrition). Among wealthy peoples, 60-70% seems to be genetic.
The usual analogy is the height of growing corn. In nutrient-poor dirt, corn height is mostly a function of how much fertilizer/water/sun the plants get. But in well-tended farms, corn stalk height is almost completely a function of inherited genetics.
When I say there is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone I’m summarizing the findings of the skin tone studies cited in the Nisbett article that was heavily discussed in this conversation. The studies examined IQ among blacks and found that whether the person was light-skinned or dark-skinned had more or less no bearing on that person’s IQ (the assumption being that skin tone is a rough proxy for degree of African descent). I think this was obvious at the time from the context of the paragraph: I’m clearly summarizing findings not making general conclusions (until the end). We had been going back and forth on these issues for a while so by that point I was probably using more shorthand than usual. It may not be obvious that is what I was doing a month after the fact.
Just to clarify: the question is whether there is a genetic component to the observed difference in black/white (and other racial) group IQ scores.
Yes, I’m pretty sure the context is more that sufficient to establish that this is what I was talking about. The entire discussion was about origin of the black-white IQ gap.
The studies examined IQ among blacks and found that whether the person was light-skinned or dark-skinned had more or less no bearing on that person’s IQ (the assumption being that skin tone is a rough proxy for degree of African descent).
Being more precise (pedantic?), Nisbett wrote:
the correlation between lightness of skin and IQ, averaged over a large number of studies reviewed by Shuey (1966), is in the vicinity of .10.
Assuming that correlation’s not a chance fluctuation, that would imply that there is a positive correlation between skin tone and IQ. But a meager one.
At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say “zero net evidence” but I honestly don’t remember what my reasoning was.
We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn’t mean some of the IQ gap is genetic. There have been studies demonstrating social advantages to having light skin.
At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say “zero net evidence” but I honestly don’t remember what my reasoning was.
That’s reasonable; that you were mentally weighing up Nisbett’s claim against conflicting evidence hadn’t occurred to me.
We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn’t mean some of the IQ gap is genetic.
Yeah, I don’t know how to update on meta analyses anymore. I do know though that Ruston and Jensen cite it uncritically (albeit deceptively, they just acknowledge the low correlation and move on) which may be evidence that Shuey (who did the meta analysis) is being honest.
Edit: The other thing I don’t trust is that the Shuey analysis of the 18 studies was done in 1966! I’m not sure studies on race from that period are reliable in either direction.
Edit: The other thing I don’t trust is that the Shuey analysis of the 18 studies was done in 1966!
Wow. Just how well did they correct for all external factors? I would have expected a difference in measured IQ to appear based purely on socio-economic disadvantages that are far lesser now.
I’m not sure studies on race from that period are reliable in either direction.
I’m not sure how the political bias / scientific integrity ratio then compares to now. I do suppose that some parties would be particularly interested in finding that result at that time.
Not being an American I have been exposed to different kinds of discrimination stories, both historic and current. I’m also not sure how relevant the original study would be here, unless there is actually a direct relationship between skin pigmentation and IQ. Prior to European settlement the people in Australia were isolated for tens of thousands of years, leaving skin tone a relatively poor indicator of genetic kinship. That is a lot of time for selection to work on both IQ and pigmentation.
I’m also not sure how relevant the original study would be here, unless there is actually a direct relationship between skin pigmentation and IQ.
As you point out, it isn’t safe to assume that skin tone reflects ancestry in every case. I think the race scientists implicitly reason that it’s OK to treat skin tone as an ancestry indicator among US blacks because of the relatively recent injection of African ancestry into the US gene pool, so skin tone’s association with African ancestry hasn’t been wholly eliminated/confounded yet. The same obviously wouldn’t apply to indigenous Australians.
Looked deeper. 1966 is the 2nd edition. The first was 1958. The book both Nisbett and Rushton are citing is titled “The Testing of Negro Intelligence”. From what little I can find Shuey was actually something of an early Rushton, arguing that a persistent test score gap since 1910 suggested innate intelligence differences between races. If anyone can find and electronic copy of the book let me know.
You’ll be lucky to find a copy. The book probably falls into that mid-century obscurity zone, old enough to be forgotten but not old enough to be public domain.
If it helps, the 1975 book Race Differences in Intelligence takes Shuey’s results on skin color and IQ and adapts 5 of the studies she found into a table. Looking at the table, the studies are quite a mish-mash. Three report correlation coefficients, and the other two instead report average IQ for different categories of mixed ancestry people (‘Light skin’ v. ‘Dark skin’, and ‘Strong evidence of white’ v. ‘Intermediate’ v. ‘Dominantly Negroid’). The studies date from 1926 to 1947, and the 1947 study’s an unpublished dissertation. Each study used a different IQ test. I can only imagine there’s even more variation among Shuey’s full collection of studies.
Not really a reply to you. I just found this and needed to put it somewhere. Anyone who has been following this discussion will be interested. It’s an interesting way of posing the question.
Now plot the genome of each human as a point on our lattice. Not surprisingly, there are readily identifiable clusters of points, corresponding to traditional continental ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians, Native Americans, etc. (See, for example, Risch et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet. 76:268–275, 2005.) Of course, we can get into endless arguments about how we define European or Asian, and of course there is substructure within the clusters, but it is rather obvious that there are identifiable groupings, and as the Risch study shows, they correspond very well to self-identified notions of race.
...
We see that there can be dramatic group differences in phenotypes even if there is complete allele overlap between two groups—as long as the frequency or probability distributions are distinct. But it is these distributions that are measured by the metric we defined earlier. Two groups that form distinct clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to group differences.
...
This leads us to two very distinct possibilities in human genetic variation:
Hypothesis 1: (the PC mantra) The only group differences that exist between the clusters (races) are innocuous and superficial, for example related to skin color, hair color, body type, etc.
Hypothesis 2: (the dangerous one) Group differences exist which might affect important (let us say, deep rather than superficial) and measurable characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, personality, athletic prowess, etc.
Hsu’s blog post makes two claims about race. The first argument is that ‘Hypothesis 2’ could be correct—i.e., that there could be genetically driven differences in exciting traits like IQ between races (or ‘groups,’ but I think we all know which ‘groups’ we’re really interested in). I agree with this argument.
I completely disagree with the second claim, which is that genetic clustering studies constitute ‘the scientific basis for race.’ It’s true that scientists can extract clusters from genetic data that match what we call races. If you gave me a bunch of human genotypes sampled from around the world and let me fuck around with that data and run it through PCA for a few hours, I’m sure I could do the same. But it doesn’t automatically follow that my classification is correct.
For example, if you sample some whites, sample some blacks, and expect those two categories to automatically pop out of your analysis, you might be surprised. Here’s a recent paper that estimated the European ancestry in African-Americans by analyzing genotypes from samples of US whites, US blacks, and several subgroups of Africans. Running PCA on all of the genotype data, and plotting the first two principal components of the subjects’ genotypes in each sample gave these clusters:
If we treat the widely separated clusters as races, we don’t automatically recover a black race and a white race. We end up with a Mandenka race, a white race, and a Bantu + Yoruba race, with African-Americans smeared out between them.
The researchers could no doubt have come up with an alternative rotation of the axes that would’ve projected all of the African samples on top of each other, and the European sample far away from them. But what would justify the alternative projection over the original one?
Maybe my own personal concept of ‘race’ emphasizes differences among sub-Saharan Africans, instead of continental differences. Then I might do a PCA on a set of sub-Saharan African genotypes, find a couple of principal components that best separate out the sub-Saharan African subgroups, and only then plot the north Africans and non-Africans along with the sub-Saharans.
Here are a few plots from a study that did just that. Notice now that the most widely separated clusters are three, or perhaps four, sub-Saharan African clusters—and the rest of the world forms one little cluster in the middle of them!
If I were a scientist who had started with the idea that the main races consisted of several African subgroups, plus one other race containing all non-Africans, this analysis would seem to completely vindicate my initial beliefs! But the analysis turned out the way it did mainly because the way I did it was driven by my original taxonomy of ‘races.’
I’ve picked out two papers myself to make points, now I’ll write a bit about the ‘Risch et al.’ paper Hsu points to. Risch et al. calculated genetic clusters by running data collected for the Family Blood Pressure Program through the structure program. Hsu writes that the clusters that emerged ‘correspond very well to self-identified notions of race.’
Well, there’s no ready-made algorithm which takes genotypes as input and spits out objectively determined races, and structure is no exception. There are some subtleties to how the program works. For one thing, it doesn’t automatically confirm an optimal number of clusters and then sort the subjects into the appropriate number of clusters: the researcher tells structure to put subjects into some number k of clusters, and the program then does its best to fit the subjects into k clusters. So the fact that structure’s output contained an intuitively pleasing number of clusters doesn’t mean very much.
Another issue is that the kind of model structure uses to represent distributions of genotypes is suboptimal for cases where samples have been isolated due to distance and have suffered a lack of gene flow. But, if Hsu is correct, this is exactly the case for Risch et al.‘s data, since he writes that Risch et al.‘s ‘clustering is a natural consequence of geographical isolation, inheritance and natural selection operating over the last 50k years since humans left Africa!’
There is more I could write, but I might as well just link this book chapter, which discusses issues with trying to algorithmically infer someone’s racial ancestry. I’ve already written more than I meant to—sorry for the lecture—but it disappoints me when someone well-credentialed (a professor of physics!) uncritically waves around ambiguous results to shore up a folk model of race.
Yes, there are clines, but so what? The population fraction in the clinal region between the major groups is tiny.
The distance (e.g. measured by fst) between the continental groups is so large that you would have to stand on your head to not “discover” those as separate clusters.
Yes, there are clines, but so what? The population fraction in the clinal region between the major groups is tiny.
I’m not sure that this contradicts what I wrote. I acknowledge that high-resolution genotyping enables one to distinguish geographically distant samples of people. Being able to pull that off does not automatically validate ‘race,’ as in the conventional white people v. yellow people v. brown people v. red people taxonomy.
The distance (e.g. measured by fst) between the continental groups is so large that you would have to stand on your head to not “discover” those as separate clusters.
Or you need only come at the data with an unusual preconception of race, which would affect your analytic approach.
Also, if you take wide-ranging genetic samples across Africa (as opposed to using a handful of samples from one Nigerian city to represent all of Africa, as seems to have been done to derive your picture), it seems to me that you end up getting African clusters that can be as far apart from each other as they are from Europeans.
Another example: check out subdiagram A in this diagram, from a paper that took samples from West and South Africa. The Fulani + Bulala are as far apart from some of the other African samples as they are from the Europeans!
it seems to me that you end up getting African clusters that can be as far apart from each other as they are from Europeans. <
I doubt this would be the case as measured by fst. Note that distance on a principal components graph is not the same as fst: the components might be optimized to separate the clusters of choice (optimize the directions in gene space which show the most variance between the groups). It’s possible in principle that some groups (e.g., pygmies) in Africa have been as effectively separated in gene flow from other Africans as, say, Nigerians and Europeans. More likely, the fst distance between any two groups of Africans is less than the distance from the Yoruba to Europeans or E. Asians. That is what happens when you analyze the (better studied) sub-population structure of, e.g., Europe and Asia. That is, no two groups in E. Asia are anywhere near as far apart as they are collectively from Europeans (and the same for any two European groups vs distance to Asia). That’s just what you’d expect from the historical gene flow patterns, and I’d expect it to apply to Africa as well.
The real question is whether folk notions of ethnicity map onto clusters in gene space. If they do (and they do) it implies different frequency distributions for alleles in the groups. That raises the possibility of statistical group differences. What those differences are remains to be determined.
I agree on the subject of Fst; if you switch from PCA biplots to Fst, that’s going to better emphasize differences due to geographical separation. (But likely still not enough to scientifically confirm a classical racial taxonomy as the one true racial taxonomy. One would still have to decide which samples to use to build one’s Fst matrix and address the issue of how to extract racial categories from the Fst matrix. I’d also anticipate getting caught up in the same sort of issues as the structure program.)
The real question is whether folk notions of ethnicity map onto clusters in gene space.
Folk notions of ethnicity arguably could, because they are far more squishy and pliable than folk notions of race.
If they do (and they do) it implies different frequency distributions for alleles in the groups.
I can’t help feeling that you believe I’m arguing against the validity of race because I think that disproves the possibility of statistical group differences. If so, you can rest easy. I acknowledge the possibility of statistical group differences—it doesn’t live or die by the validity of race. I see (or think I do, anyway) genetic group differences in (relatively) boring traits like skin color and hair color—and if those, why not genetic group differences in drama-provoking traits like IQ, personality or genital size?
OK, so we just differ in nuances of definition. If you prefer ethnicity to race, that’s fine with me.
Well, for whatever it’s worth, I continue to disagree with one of the arguments in the blog entry I mentioned—there is more here than a minor semantic divide.
The usual lame argument is “race doesn’t exist, so how could there be group differences”—but I think neither of us is arguing that side.
So your position is that there are probably allele clusters do to cultural and geographic isolation (and therefore potentially group differences in IQ or personality) your concern is that you don’t think those clusters have been shown to map one to one with our folk racial categories?
Do you think our folk racial categories aren’t the product of observable phenotypes? Do you think those categories at least approximate a valid scientific taxonomy?
My concern (or at least the one that I’m elaborating on in this thread) is that those clusters can be made to map onto folk racial categories, or made to be only partly consistent with folk racial categories, or made to be contradictory to folk racial categories, depending upon how one’s own preconceptions of race color one’s cluster analyses.
Do you think our folk racial categories aren’t the product of observable phenotypes?
No.
Do you think those categories at least approximate a valid scientific taxonomy?
Valid for which scientific purpose? They are likely to be workable categories for a sociologist studying race relations. They are likely to be inadequate categories for a molecular anthropologist studying human genetic variation. Though I expect some molecular anthropologists (and evidently at least one professor of physics) would dispute that.
I’ve already written more than I meant to—sorry for the lecture
Here of all places this is unnecessary. I posted the link specifically hoping someone would respond like this.
It’s true that scientists can extract clusters from genetic data that match what we call races. If you gave me a bunch of human genotypes sampled from around the world and let me fuck around with that data and run it through PCA for a few hours, I’m sure I could do the same. But it doesn’t automatically follow that my classification is correct.
If we treat the widely separated clusters as races, we don’t automatically recover a black race and a white race. We end up with a Mandenka race, a white race, and a Bantu + Yoruba race, with African-Americans smeared out between them.
If we’re discovering clusters that don’t fit with our racial preconceptions that is evidence the clusters that do match some of our racial preconceptions aren’t bullshit. Also, aren’t we looking for genetic evidence of cultural and geographical isolation? Isn’t the fact that we see different clusters for different groups in Africa just evidence that those groups have been (reproductively) isolated for a really long time? I would predict from these findings that when humans first left the continent there were already distinct groupings and that not all of these grouping had descendants that left Africa.
Also, from the chart posted here I would predict that the Africans kidnapped and purchased as slaves came more from the Yoruba and much less so from the Mandenka. They probably didn’t all come from the Yoruba, perhaps the others came from the groups in the upper right corner of this chart that you linked in your other comment. Or perhaps they didn’t come from the Yoruba but others in that corner and the Yoruba are just closely related to those other groups.
EDIT: So there were a lot of tribes that had members become slaves. Like nearly every major tribe appears to have been affected. I’m going to have to find something that tells me proportions which will take longer.
From your other comment on that chart.
The Fulani + Bulala are as far apart from some of the other African samples as they are from the Europeans!
If you go search for pictures of both you can notice the phenotype differences as well.
Here of all places this is unnecessary. I posted the link specifically hoping someone would respond like this.
Mission accomplished! :-)
If we’re discovering clusters that don’t fit with our racial preconceptions that is evidence the clusters that do match some of our racial preconceptions aren’t bullshit.
Sounds reasonable.
Also, aren’t we looking for genetic evidence of cultural and geographical isolation? Isn’t the fact that we see different clusters for different groups in Africa just evidence that those groups have been (reproductively) isolated for a really long time?
It can be, although variation along principal component axes can also represent genetic change due to migration. (I picked up on this potential confound by reading a Nature Genetics paper that made the same point from the opposite direction. That is, variation along a PC can be due to continuous geographic separation instead of migration.)
Also, from the chart posted here I would predict that the Africans kidnapped and purchased as slaves came more from the Yoruba and much less so from the Mandenka.
That’s looks about right to me. Table 1 from the paper estimating African ancestry gives a detailed breakdown of the African ancestry of the African-American sample, and it fits what you suggest.
The existence of God has probably the lowest prior probability of any hypothesis ever seriously considered by humans. Any evidence in favor of theism has been swamped …
Surely you mean ‘likelihood’ here, not prior probability. Prior probabilities are imputed based on one’s uncertainty before any evidence is taken into account, and theism scores fairly high on this metric.
Also, I think the confusion merely arises from arrangement and Gricean-maxim(-like?) considerations—I predict adding “Further” before “[a]ny evidence” would suffice to invoke the correct interpretation.
The fundamental similarity is that it’s possible to be reasonable confident of a conclusion based on general knowledge, common sense, and despite scientific studies to the contrary.
Now for the hundredth time, if you would like to share the knowledge that we don’t have that makes you so confident you are welcome to.
Lol, you have all the knowledge necessary to come to the same conclusion as I have. Surely you are aware that the cognitive gap between blacks and whites is essentially universal and intractable*. In both time and space, as far as anyone knows. While at the same time, other explanations offered for the gap are not so.
There is only one reasonable inference from these facts. One simple explanation which is not inherently ridiculous.
*I agree that the gap can be lessened to some extent since black children face the environmental disadvantage of being raised by black parents.
it’s possible to be reasonable confident of a conclusion based on general knowledge, common sense, and despite scientific studies to the contrary.
This is true. It’s also possible to be way too overconfident, based on these same things, and unacknowledged confounders. This is the problem that scientific studies try to address.
apparently even some scientific studies which supposedly demonstrate the power of prayer.
If I recall correctly, there are studies that demonstrate the power of believing one is being prayed for, whether or not one actually is. In studies where the people being prayed for don’t know about it, there is no significant difference.
I did a google search and found this, among other things:
One of the most cited studies in prayer literature was conducted by the physician Randolph Byrd in 1988. Byrd looked at the effects of prayer in the Judeo-Christian tradition in a coronary care unit (CCU) population. Over ten months, 393 patients admitted to the CCU were randomly assigned to a treatment group that would receive distant prayers, or a control group that would receive no prayers.
Three to seven people prayed daily for the rapid recovery, and prevention of complications or death, for a single patient in the treatment group. The end result was that statistically significantly fewer patients in the prayer group required ventilation, antibiotics, had cardiopulmonary arrests, developed pneumonia, or required diuretics.
You appear to be referring to Nisbett’s paragraph starting with
A few sentences below that Nisbett refers to NAEP data to say that the reading score gap could be gone in 25 years and the science score gap in 75 years, if trends continue. [ETA: this is the ‘largest study’ that Nisbett cites. I’m sad Nisbett didn’t give a more specific citation for it.]
The page you link appears to have data on the NAEP tests, but only for the mathematics tests. Clicking on the ‘White-Black Gap’ button, and then on the ‘Age 17’ tab (as Nisbett refers to 12th graders, so I am guessing that is what he and you are talking about...?) shows
a 1973 gap of 40 points
a 1982 gap of 32 points
a 1986 gap of 29 points
a 1990 gap of 21 points
then some fluctuations between 26 and 31 points until the most recent survey (2008), which has a 26 point gap
The data linked do not appear to bear strongly on Nisbett’s claims about the NAEP data (because Nisbett refers to the reading and science NAEP scores, not math), and I am also having difficulty seeing the ‘small narrowing of the black/white gap between 1973 and 1982 and a fairly consistent gap thereafter.’ in the data linked.
All in all, I am having difficulty substantiating your claim that Nisbett’s claim is unsubstantiated by the data. I suspect either I am not interpreting your comment correctly, or the link in it happens to point to a data set other than the one you intended. Could you clarify?
(About the bigger question of whether black-white IQ differences have narrowed recently, it may be informative to read William Dickens and James Flynn’s 2006 paper, which takes IQ test norming data and shows a narrowing of the IQ gap between 1972 and 2002. (Rushton and Jensen disagreed with the conclusions of that paper, but I find Dickens and Flynn’s rebuttal convincing.)
I chose it at random and stopped with the first graph I found so nobody could accuse me of cherry picking. Looking more carefully at what Nisbett wrote, I see he did not specifically mention math scores.
I’m not sure if this makes a difference. If Nisbett was cherry-picking data, it doesn’t really help his argument.
The one graph I looked at at random doesn’t seem to support the claim that the gap (generally speaking) is narrowing and headed towards disappearing. Agreed?
When I see your random graph, I see the gap halving[!] from 1973 to 1990, widening through the 1990s, and maybe gradually shrunking since then. I see contradictory trends over the past 40 years, but it’s more likely than not that the gap has resumed narrowing. So I’m not sure I do agree with you.
Since you write ‘generally speaking’ I guess you might be asking about the general trend as a whole from 1973 to now. I reckon that’s an overall shrinking trend too.
To check my gut feeling more systematically, I did a quick regression of the score gap against year. (Not the best way to do it, but it beats eyeballing.) That gets me a .35 or .36 point shrinking per year depending on which assessment format I use for 2004. At that rate, the current gap (26 points in ’08) would disappear in 70 to 75 years.
That’s the same time period Nisbett gives for the disappearance of the science score gap, which I think is evidence against Nisbett ‘cherry-picking’ - if he cut out data because it had gaps that closed too slowly for his hypothesis, he would’ve left out the science data as well as the math data.
Summing up, I think I fundamentally disagree with you on the most likely interpretation of your graph.
Say what? The gap is 35 points in 1973 and 27 points in 1990. How is this halving?
Aha, I misunderstood which chart you had in mind. I thought that your link was intended to go to the data for 17 year olds, but that you were unable to link it directly because the page used Javascript to flip between the charts for different ages. I see now I’m wrong about that—one can link directly to the chart for each age, and it sounds like you were pointing to the age 9 data.
So I’ll try this again with the 9 year olds. I’ve taken the liberty of looking at the black-white gap graph instead of the scale score graph so I don’t have to do any mental arithmetic to get the gap size at each testing. Looks to me like the gap consistently narrowed from 1973 to 1986, and has fluctuated from 1986 so it’s sometimes wider, sometimes thinner, but no overall trend since then.
Regressing gap size on year like I did before gives a shrinking of .24 or .25 points per year. So the picture is more mixed than for the older kids: there’s an overall shrinking, but it’s only two-thirds what you get for 17 year olds, and the trend looks like it’s stalled since the late 80s.
Still, I am not sure that this means Nisbett is wrong. Looking at the bit of Nisbett you quote yourself downthread, Nisbett does not seem to say anything about the math scores, which means looking at the math scores would not tell us whether Nisbett is wrong or right.
It is possible that Nisbett cherry-picked by ignoring the math data, but I think a .25 point per year narrowing is still evidence against that idea. At a quarter point per year, the math gap would disappear in about a century, which isn’t much longer than the 75 years Nisbett suggests for science.
Of course there are ways to interpret the graph to argue that the gap is narrowing and on track to disappear, but if you look at it and use your common sense, it’s just not a reasonable conclusion.
The reasonable conclusion—as you allude to—is that the gap has been pretty much stable for a number of years.
You put more trust in your common sense than I do. I try to avoid depending exclusively on what my common sense infers from eyeballing noisy time series—that way lies ’global warming stopped in 1998’esque error.
I find your preferred interpretation reasonable, but I don’t see why it would be unreasonable to look at the entire data and see a net narrowing. (Especially if we lacked the 2008 data, as Nisbett did.)
If the choice is between trusting your common sense and trusting someone with an agenda, I would say go with your common sense.
Here’s a thought experiment: You show the graph I linked to to 10 statisticians, except you replace the labels with something less politically charged. For example, the price of winter wheat versus the price of summer wheat. And you ask them to interpret the graph as far as long term trends go. I’m pretty confident that 10 out of 10 would interpret the graph the same way I did.
Ditto for global surface temperatures. Take the temperature label off the graph and tell people it’s the dollar to yen exchange rate. I bet 10 out of 10 statisticians will say the rate is basically flat for the last 10 years.
cupholder has the empirical data—which, you will note, is increasing in all cases—but do you really imagine that no-one’s tried a blind test?
No I do not imagine so. But I’m a little confused. Are you saying that the absence of significant cooling is the same thing as the presence of significant warming?
PS: The empirical data is not “increasing in all cases.” Indeed, by most accounts global surface temperatures have not met or exceeded the high reached 12 years ago.
Every 10-year trendline in cupholder’s data was increasing.
If you give a statistician the 30-year or 130-year data set with the y-axis label taken off, they will tell you that there is no sign of a levelling-off.
A quick clarification: for each of the data links I posted there, the trendline is calculated based on all of the data that’s shown, i.e. for the post-1998 data the trendline is based on the last twelve years, for the post-1970s data the trendline is based on all of the post-1970s data, and so on. In other words, only the data for the last 10 years of data really have a 10-year trendline.
[ETA: Unless you mean you calculated 10-year trendlines for each data set yourself, in which case feel free to disregard this.]
Here’s a plot of the UAH index from 1998 to 2009.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1998/to:2009/plot/uah/from:1998/to:2009/trend
The linear trend is definitely decreasing for this particular plot.
I’m seriously skeptical of this.
P.S. Are you saying that the absence of significant cooling is the same thing as the presence of significant warming?
Note that changing the beginning data point to either 1997 or 1999 makes the regression line have a positive slope. It’s not at all surprising that there is enough variability that cherry-picking data is possible. Stuffing a positive outlier at the beginning will, of course, tend to do this.
Agreed. I cherry-picked 1998 as a starting point to counter the claim that the data was increasing “in all cases.”
Still, I would also note that as I explain on my blog post, there is some significance to the observation that global surface temperatures still have not exceeded the 1998 high. (According to the majority of leading temperature measurements.)
Did you read the linked article?
[...]
1998 was a strong El Nino year—unusually high atmospheric temperatures that year in no way suggests that the earth has stopped heating.
Yes, and I’m not sure what your point is.
Are you claiming that the absence of a significant cooling trend is the same thing as the presence of a significant warming trend?
It’s a very simple question. Why won’t you answer it?
Incidentally, I wrote a blog post about the article in question which touches on these issues.
http://brazil84.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/more-on-global-cooling/
I’m claiming that this one data set does not by itself support rejection of the body of theory that suggests global warming is occurring, and that it is intellectually dishonest to imply that it does.
Well answered (and I have downvoted brazil for trying to coerce you into making a stupid claim with the obvious intent of presenting a misleading dichotomy.)
In light of the spelling thread, dichotomy? This immediately jumped out at me in the manner that a few others describe for spelling mistakes.
Thankyou. It jumped out at me too upon rereading. I wonder why my browser has stopped spell checking for me.
I’m not sure what the claim “global warming is occuring” means so I can’t really speak to that.
In any event, as I noted in the blog post, the warmists have made specific predictions. The temperature record for the past 10 or so years contradicts some of those predictions.
ETA: Can I take it that your answer to my question is “no”?
I’m not saying the absence of a significant cooling trend is the same thing as the presence of a significant warming trend—that would be a stupid thing to say. As for the remainder: I don’t trust your judgment, but the data you provided is interesting. I will examine the composite NOAA temperature data (ocean, land, and combined) and update accordingly.
(It should be noted, however, that if anthropogenic inputs are significant, as claimed by the climate scientists whose work we are discussing, predicting the climate would require predicting all anthropogenic climate forcings—and therefore we might expect the predictions to be worse than anticipated.)
They can get around this by expressing their predictions as a function of future anthropogenic emissions, thus removing this source of uncertainty.
From the papers I looked at today, a major problem appears to be measuring the forcings that go into the model.
I imagine they do—do we have a climatologist in the house?
I imagine they do too; the question is whether they claim the right to (retroactively) “massage” their predictions, which would invalidate this test.
Correct. Which is why the article you linked to does not contradict the claim I made.
Well you shouldn’t trust my judgment. What’s the motto of the British science academy? Something like “Don’t take my word for it.”
I am far less confident.
I bet it would depend on exactly which data set you gave them. Do you give them data for the past 10 years, data since 1998, the data since they started measuring temperatures with satellites as well as thermometers, or the longest-running data set, which runs from 1850 onwards? If you just give them the last decade of data, they might well just write it off as flat and noisy, but if you let them judge the recent numbers in the context of the entire time series, they might recognize them as flat-looking fuzz obscuring an ongoing linear trend.
That sounds nice, but I don’t know how practical that would turn out to be, in this case or in general. In this particular case, how can I even tell with certainty whether you have ‘an agenda’ or not? And what if the key participants in a debate all have some agenda? It’s very possible that Nisbett has a ‘politically correct’ (not that I like the phrase, but I can’t think of a better way of putting it) agenda, and that Rushton and Jensen have a ‘politically incorrect’ agenda. How do I know, and what do I do if they do? And so on.
How can you tell anything with certainty? The fact is that you can’t. Respectfully, it seems to me you are playing the “I’m such a skeptic” game.
Let me ask you this: Do you seriously doubt that Nisbett has an agenda?
I would give them the data since the 1970s when sattelite measurement became possible.
Sorry. I was being sloppy in my earlier comment, and using ‘certainty’ as a shorthand for ‘certainty enough for me to label you as Having An Agenda, and therefore to reject your interpretation of the data as Tainted With An Agenda.’ It is of course true that you can’t tell anything inductive with cast-iron 100% certainty, but what I’m getting at is the question of how to get to what you or I would practically treat as certainty (like if I put a 95% probability on someone Having An Agenda).
Let me rephrase: in this particular case, how can I even tell whether you have ‘an agenda’ with sufficient certainty to disregard whatever you say about the data, and retreat to my own common sense gut feeling?
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he believes he’s right? A tiny bit, but only in the sense that I am never completely sure of another person’s motivation for stating something.
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he wants to convince other people of what he believes? Not really.
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he has an emotional investment in the argument as well as rational considerations? Only a little...but then again, who doesn’t get emotionally invested in arguments?
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he has political motivations for his article as well as self-centered emotional and rational ones? Quite a lot, actually. I don’t think I could reliably tell Nisbett’s emotional motivations apart from those that spring from his political agenda (whatever that is—Nisbett sounds like a leftist to me, but how the hell do I really know? There were rightists who crapped on The Bell Curve too.) Does it even make sense to distinguish the two? I’m not sure. (I suddenly feel that these are good questions to think about. Thank you for prodding me into thinking of them.)
Also, for whatever it’s worth, I am just as sure that Rushton and Jensen have ‘an agenda,’ however you want to define that, as Nisbett does. Do I throw all their papers out and just go with my common sense?
To clarify, this doesn’t mean I can’t get behind the idea of being alert to other people’s biases on some subject, but I’m not willing to push that to the point of a dichotomy between my common sense vs. someone with an agenda. Taking the global warming example, I’m sure many climate scientists have ‘an agenda,’ but I’d still tend to accept their consensus interpretation of the data than my own common sense where the two differ, and I think that’s reasonable if I don’t have time to dig through all of the research myself.
In that case I think I’m roughly 90% confident that fewer than ’10 out of 10 statisticians will say the rate is basically flat for the last 10 years’. I am interpreting ‘the rate is flat here’ to mean that the net temperature trend is flat over time, as I believe we’re talking about whether global warming is continuing and not whether global warming is accelerating. (Thought process here: I reckon a randomly selected statistician has at most a 4 in 5 chance of deciding that temperatures have been ‘basically flat’ for the last 10 years’ based on the satellite data. Then the chance of 10 random statisticians all saying temperatures have been flat is 11%, so an 89% chance of at least one of them dissenting.)
By “having an agenda,” I mean that Nisbett is emphasizing the facts that support a particular point of view and de-emphasizing the facts which undermine that point of view in order to persuade the reader.
So defined, one can ask whether Nisbett has an agenda. Do you have any doubt that Nisbett has an agenda?
So by your definition, the temperature trend is NOT basically flat between 1995 and the present, correct?
Not much. I think it is very likely that Nisbett suffers from confirmation bias about as much as everybody else.
Eyeballing it I’d say it’s much more likely that temperatures rose since 1995 than that they stayed flat, so I’d say you’re pretty much correct. I wouldn’t dogmatically say it’s not flat in big capital letters, but I think the rising temperature hypothesis is a lot more likely than the flat temperature hypothesis.
I’d double check my intuition by running a regression, but that’d stack the deck because of autocorrelation, and I can’t remember from the top of my head how to fit a linear model that accounts for that.
I’m not sure what this means. Are you saying that every piece of written material has an agenda behind it as I’ve defined the term?
And do you agree that according to Phil Jones, there has been no statistically significant warming between 1995 and the present?
The fact that you quote this doesn’t help your credibility. The Economist: Journalistic malpractice on global warming
I’m not sure what your point is. My argument does not depend on my credibility.
In any event, do you agree that “journalistic malpractice” works both ways? In other words, if it’s malpractice to claim that there has been no warming since 1995, it’s also malpractice to claim that there has been no cooling since 1998?
Not every piece of written material, but I’d bet that almost all lengthy pieces of writing intended to communicate a point to others have an agenda behind them, sure. There’s always a temptation to round the numbers to your advantage, to leave out bits of data that might conflict with your hypothesis, to neglect to mention possible problems with your statistical tests, and so on.
Even ignoring that sort of thing, cognitive biases play an important role. Nisbett presumably had a half-formed opinion of the race and IQ argument even before he started researching it in depth. And that would in turn have affected which bits of relevant evidence got stuck in his mind. And that would in turn have hardened his opinion. You get positive feedbacks that push your opinion away from others that conflict with it. So even if Nisbett were consciously being as honest as possible, he could still be
just because his mental database of facts is going to overrepresent the 1st kind of fact and underrepresent the 2nd—and precisely because of that, he is going to be sure that his point of view is obviously correct, and precisely because of that, he is going to be writing to persuade the reader of it—even though, as far as he knows, he is being completely honest!
(Tangent: it’s somehow amusing and fitting that the person we’re using to argue this point is the person whose most cited article is “Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes.”)
That’s what he said.
Ok, and the stronger the agenda, the more you should trust your common sense over claims made by the person with the agenda.
Ok, and presumably what he meant was that any warming which took place between 1995 and the present was less than some statistical minimum threshold. I’m not sophisticated enough to calculate such a limit, but that’s what I meant when I said that temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 years.
Cool. I feel more comfortable now that you’ve expressed this in continuous terms. There’s still a catch, though: using your definition of having an agenda, I can’t really tell whether someone has an agenda without also knowing the facts (because ‘having an agenda’ here is being used to mean that someone’s making a slanted presentation of the facts), and if I know the facts already, I have little need for your has-an-agenda heuristic.
Roughly speaking, I think that’s about right.
I think I understand now. Alrighty...yeah, I would suspect that there’s been no statistically significant warming trend in the last 10 years. I would however avoid using phrases like ‘temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 years’ to describe this, as I nonetheless believe that if one considers the last 10 years of records in the context of unambiguous past warming, they are consistent with an ongoing, underlying warming trend.
I would suggest you practice. It also helps to read people who contradict eachother. It also helps if you learn some of the facts.
Lol, I guess that means American housing prices have been going up the last couple years too.
In any event, I think it’s fair to say that temperatures have been basically flat because it contradicts many of the predictions of the warmists.
I reckon the first two things only help in as much as they help you do the third. Learning the facts is what really matters—and in my experience, once I feel I know enough about an issue to decide who has an agenda (in your sense of the phrase), I typically feel I know enough to make my own judgement of the issue without having to tie my colours to the talking head I like the most.
I am not familiar enough with US house prices to be sure, but I suspect that’s a poor analogy to the global warming data.
Here are two better criteria for judging your statement’s fairness:
is the statement true?
is the statement liable to mislead people?
How is it a poor analogy? The general for the last 50 years is upwards, but the trend over the last couple years is flat or downwards.
And how do I know if the statement is liable to mislead people?
A quick Google for house price data led me to this graph of US house prices from 1970 up until what looks like last year. It is immediately clear to me that there is far less noise obscuring the changes in trends than in the global temperature data. The recent house price crash looks about an order of magnitude larger than the seasonal(?) fuzz, so it’s easy to distinguish it from the earlier upward trend.
Compare the temperature data. It’s quite clear that there’s relatively a lot more noise and external forcing, which makes it harder to see a trend in the data. That’s why it’s reasonable to suppose that past upward trends in temperature are continuing, even though the most recent temperatures look flat in some of the data sets; the greater noise hurts your statistical power to detect a trend, which means that you can get the appearance of no trend whether or not the upward trend is continuing.
Hence why I see your analogy as a poor one: you’re implying that arguing for an ongoing increase in temperature is as silly as arguing for an ongoing increase in house prices, but that ignores the far greater statistical power to detect a change in trend in recent house price data.
Apply your rough mental model of how other people are likely to interpret your statement to decide whether your statement is likely to direct them to a misleading impression of the data.
For example, if I show someone this graph, it’s fair to say that there’s a significant chance they’ll think it shows that US temperature increase per century has no practical significance. But that would of course be a fallacious inference: the fact that other temperature measurements can vary a lot is logically disconnected from the issue of whether the rise in US temperature has real importance. In that sense the graph is liable to mislead.
It may be reasonable to suppose so, but it doesn’t change the fact that temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 (or 15) years.
In any event, it’s quite possible—even likely—that the upward trend in housing prices is continuing in the same sense you believe that the upward trend in temperatures may be continuing; and that the recent housing bubble is the rough equivalent of an el nino
I don’t believe it is true that ‘temperatures have been basically flat’ for the last 15 years: I see a net gain of 0.1 to 0.2 Kelvin, depending on the data set (HadCRUT3 v. GISTEMP v. UAH v. RSS). And it looks to me like temperatures have only been ‘flat’ for the last 10 years in the sense that a short enough snippet of a noisy time series will always look ‘flat.’
And the accompanying crash would be a La Niña? I think the house price boom & crash is a little too big to characterize like that.
So the standard is “net gain,” and a net gain greater than (or less than) 0.1 Kelvin means not basically flat?
That may be true, but so what? characterization of evidence != interpretation of evidence. Agreed?
Why not? It’s a short term detour in a larger overall trend. If you happened to buy a house at the top of the market, there is still an excellent chance that some day the market price will exceed your purchase price.
Any net gain (or net loss), however small, means not flat, if you are confident enough that it’s not an artefact or noise. (Adding the adverb ‘basically’ muddies things a bit, because it implies that you’re not interested in small deviations from flatness.) So: am I quite confident that there has been a deviation from flatness since 1995, and that the deviation is neither artefact nor noise? Yes. But you knew that already, so I’ll go deeper.
You earlier referred to the Phil Jones interview where he stated that the warming since 1995 is ‘only just’ statistically insignificant. I don’t know enough about testing autocorrelated time series to check that, but I’m willing to pretty much trust him on this point.
OK, so every so often on Less Wrong you see a snippet of Jaynes or a popular science article presented in the context of a frequentism vs. Bayesianism comparison. I’ve gone to bat before (see that first link’s discussion) to explain why pitting the two against each other seems wrong-minded to me. I’ve yet to see an example where frequentist methods necessarily have to give a different result to Bayesian methods, just by virtue of being frequentist rather than Bayesian. I see the two as two sides of the same coin.
Still, there are certain techniques that are more associated with the frequentist school than the Bayesian. One of them is statistical significance testing. That particular technique gets a lot of heat from statisticians of all sorts (not just Bayesians!), and arguably rightly so. People are liable to equate statistical significance with practical significance, which is simply wrong, and to dogmatically reject any null hypothesis that doesn’t clear a particular p-value bar. On this point, I have to agree with the critics. Far as I can tell, there are too many people who fundamentally misunderstand significance tests, and as someone who does understand them (or I think I do—maybe that’s just the Dunning-Kruger effect talking) and finds them useful, that disappoints me.
In the end, you have to exercise judgment in interpreting significance tests, like any other tool. Just because a test limps over the magic significance level with a p-value of 0.049 doesn’t mean you should immediately shitcan your null hypothesis, and just because your test falls a hair short with an 0.051 p-value doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.
To get more specific, that net warming since 1995 has been ‘just’ statistically insignificant does not mean no warming. It means that under a particular model, the null hypothesis of no overall trend cannot be rejected. It could be because there really is no trend. Or there might be a true trend, but your data are too noisy and too few. Or the test could be cherrypicked. You have to exercise judgment and decide which is most likely. I believe the last two possibilities are most likely: I can see the noise with my own eyes, and apparently 1995 is the earliest year where warming since that year is statistically insignificant, which would be consistent with cherry-picking the year 1995.
Which is why I reject the null hypothesis of no net temperature change since 1995, even though the p-value of Phil Jones’ test is presumably a bit higher than 0.05.
They are distinct concepts.
I get the feeling that you think calling the last decade of temperatures ‘flat’ is characterization and not interpretation, and I would disagree. When I say temperatures have risen overall, that’s an interpretation. When you say they have not, that’s an interpretation. Either interpretation is defensible, though I believe mine is more accurate (but of course I would believe that).
Right, but if you compare the housing price detour to the noise in the house price data, it’s relatively way way bigger than the El Niño deviation compared to the noise in the temperature data.
I pulled the temperature data behind this plot and regressed temperature on year. Then I calculated the standard deviation of the residuals from the start of the time series up to 1998 (when the EN kicked in). The peak in the data (at ‘year’ 1998.08, with a value of 0.6595 degrees) is then 3.9 sigmas above the regression line.
Look back at the home price graph—maybe that particular graph’s been massively smoothed, but the post-peak drop looks like way more than a 4 sigma decline: I’d eyeball it as on the order of 10-20 sigmas—and that’s a big underestimate because the standard deviation is going to be inflated by what looks like a seasonal fluctuation (the yearly-looking spikes). The El Niño is big and bold, no doubt about it, but it’s a puppy compared to the housing pricing crash.
Of course it muddies things and we should not be interested in small deviations. That’s the basic point of your argument. The only question is how small is small.
Well can you give me an example of a statement about temperature in the last 10 years which is not an “interpretation”?
So what? In 1998, would it have been wrong to say that global surface temperatures had risen (relatively) rapidly over the previous few years?
?!
The point I was making in the first 550 words of the grandparent comment is that one shouldn’t automatically disregard a small deviation from flatness merely because it’s (barely) statistically insignificant. I am not sure how you interpreted it to mean that ‘we should not be interested in small deviations.’
A statement that’s a few written words or sentences? I doubt it. Trying to summarize a complicated time series in a few words is inevitably going to mean not mentioning some features of the time series, and your editorial judgment of which features not to mention means you’re interpreting it.
You should know, you asked me ‘Why not?’ in the first place.
Practically, yes, because that claim carries the implication that the El Niño spike is representative of the warming ‘over the previous few years.’
My linear regressions based on NOAA data (I was stupid and lost the citation for where I downloaded it) have 0.005-0.007 K/year since 1880; 0.1 to 0.2 K in a decade is beating the trend.
What are the uncertainties on each of these?
I took the liberty of downloading the GISTEMP data, which I suspect are very similar to the NOAA data (because the GISTEMP series also starts at 1880, and I dimly remember reading somewhere that the GISS gets land-based temperature data from the NOAA). Regressing anomaly on year I get an 0.00577 K/year increase since 1880, consistent with Robin’s estimate. R tells me the standard error on that estimate is 0.00011 K/year.
However, that standard error estimate should be taken with a pinch of salt for two reasons: the regression’s residuals are correlated, and it is unlikely that a linear model is wholly appropriate because global warming was reduced mid-century by sulphate emissions. Caveat calculator!
(ETA: I just noticed you wrote ‘these,’ so I thought you might be interested in the trend for the past decade as well. Regressing anomaly on year for the past 120 monthly GISTEMP temperature anomalies has a trend of 0.0167 ± 0.0023 K/year, but the same warning about that standard error applies.)
I have no idea. Varying the starting point from ten to thirty years ago with Feb 2010 as the endpoint puts the slope anywhere in the range [-0.0001,0.2], so it must be fairly large on the scale of a decade.
Your regression package doesn’t report uncertainties? (Ideally this would be in the form of a covariance matrix.)
My regression package is a tab-deliminated data file, a copy of MATLAB, and least-squares.
You’re looking at age 9, cupholder is looking at 17.
In that case he is looking at the wrong graph when he talks about “your random graph.”
Yes, but in that case you aren’t looking at the data that Nisbett referred to. As cupholder pointed out
Agree, but as I said to cupholder, it doesn’t help Nisbett’s argument if he is cherry-picking data.
But Nisbett is quoting from a study “which found improvement on almost all tests for African American 12th graders”. That study may not even have contained the data on 9-year-olds. You can ask “Why didn’t that study include that data?”, well because they were comparing data for 12th graders.
Actually, it’s not clear to me what study he is talking about. Here’s what he says:
So I went to the NAEP web site and looked at the very first graph I saw. What study do you think he is referring to?
I take this to say that Hedges and Nowell examined lots of test results for African Amercicans 12th graders from 1965-1994. The test with the largest sample was the NAEP test. Since Hedges and Nowell were looking at 12th graders Nisbett is probably talking about the 17-year-olds.
I could be wrong. In any case, the trends have changed since 1994 so obviously the predictions don’t hold.
This all seems pretty beside the point to me since the evidence that really matters is the adoption and skin tone studies. The other thing that becomes obvious is that there just isn’t nearly enough data—all the studies are decades old presumably because 1975 was the last time you could get grant money to study the issue. There certainly isn’t enough to conclude, as you did, that there is obviously a genetic component.
Well Nisbett refers to a “study” by the NAEP.
That may be so, but I intentionally chose to run down data from the very first part of the paper so that nobody could accuse me of nitpicking or cherrypicking.
That’s only if you feel you need to rely on scientific studies to reach conclusions. Some things don’t require such a study.
Yes, but you have to be super careful when deciding which things need scientific studies.
A few years ago I would’ve said women were so much more chatty than men—and that the difference in chattiness was so obvious—that it would be a waste of time to check it out scientifically. But sometimes, when you check things out systematically, you’re surprised. I think the argument about blacks, whites and IQ is a bit like that, although that argument is more about the cause of the differences and not their mere existence.
I would never have predicted that women would be more chatty in such a test. I would have predicted that men would talk more on a supplied topic. I believed, and still believe that women are more chatty under the commonly intended meaning of ‘chatty’. A more relevant test:
Asign random pairs of people and send them on a 5 hour hike together. Count words.
I would expect female pairs to say more words than the male pairs. Mixed pairings I would find somewhat more difficult to predict due to possible interference from courtship protocols.
I have my doubts about how strongly that particular test would correlate with what I understand by ‘chatty’. It’s a pretty artificial setup. When I think about it I have a pretty fuzzy idea of what ‘chatty’ means though. I would still say women are more chatty than men but that is partly because some part of the fuzzy definition involves ‘the type of small talk that women tend to engage in more than men’ rather than some idea of total word volume.
I’m interested that you believed women were much more chatty than men as recently as a few years ago.
I can remember it being a default belief in the culture that women were more chatty, but I thought it had faded out in the 80s or thereabouts.
I imagine it’s less widespread a belief than before the 80s, but it’s just one of those things you get by osmosis from the broader culture when you’re young. It’s part of the stereotypes there are about the sexes: women can’t drive, men won’t ask for directions when they’re lost, blah blah blah.
I would say “reasonably careful” not “super careful.” One thing I’ve noticed about the race and intelligence debate is that many people apply an extremely heightened standard of skepticism to the question.
By analogy, suppose we were debating the existence of God. There may very well be a few scientific studies out there which lend some degree of support to the theistic point of view. Further, there probably has not been a lot of scientific research into the subject. So one could take the “super careful” approach and say that the jury is still out on the subject. But that’s silly. That’s just exaggerated skepticism on the part of folks who don’t like a particular conclusion.
For those of us who do believe in God but aspire to rationality, the best we can do is to concede there’s a contradiction there.
When I suggested being ‘super careful’ I meant being super careful about deciding which things are so obvious as to not need systematic debate and study in the first place, not about deciding how skeptical to be of certain ‘sides’ or conclusions in a debate.
I’m not sure what you mean by “systematic debate and study,” but assuming it means the same thing as “scientific studies,” it seems to me it amounts to basically the same thing. At least in this case.
I’ll try and clarify with the non-race and IQ related example that first put the idea into my head: gravity. The idea of things falling to the floor is so obvious to me, and agrees so well with my common sense, that I would not even bother to debate somebody who wanted to argue that things don’t fall to the floor. That’s the behaviour I’m saying it’s a good idea to be super careful about: rejecting challenges to your existing view out of hand.
Stepping back to the race and IQ argument, I’m saying that I would exercise a lot of care before I put the argument into the ‘no need to even bother debating it’ box. Having entered into the debate, though, I would be content to apply my ordinary standards of evidence to the different ‘sides’ in the debate. I mean the ‘super careful’ warning to apply pre-debate, not during the debate.
What about the theism/atheism controversy. Can I take it that you are agnostic?
I’m still waiting for y’all to agree on what God is so I can decide. Everyone seems to have a different idea of the bugger. In the meantime I’ll carry on spending brain energy on less fuzzy things, like race and IQ and global warming.
For purposes of this discussion, we can define God as a supernatural being who who more or less did the acts ascribed to Him in the Hebrew Bible. e.g. creating the Earth, and so on. In other words, the God of Abraham.
I take it you are agnostic about the existence of the God of Abraham?
Supernatural beings do not exist.
God, as you define it, therefore does not exist.
I’m a little confused—are you saying that by definition, supernatural beings do not exist?
Otherwise, what’s your evidence/argument?
Yep. The concept of a supernatural being is incoherent.
Not according to the Richard Carrier definition of “supernatural”, which I would argue is a more accurate interpretation of the term.
Upvoted for interestingness, but that definition still leaves no room for supernatural beings as far as I’m concerned (assuming I’m interpreting Carrier’s post correctly).
That’s because I don’t draw the distinction between minds and mental things and the ‘nonmental’ that Carrier does—I’ve effectively ruled out the supernatural by fiat because I treat it as axiomatic that the mental is just a kind of physical.
I see—along the lines of theological noncognitivism, then. It’s an unusual position, in my experience.
Kinda, though I try to acknowledge that different people mean different things by ‘God.’ For example, some people equate God with love. If you do that God obviously exists.
If God really were love, praying would be a complete waste of time. I suspect such statements are not actually expressions of factual content.
Why? The placebo effect and other mindhacks apply to any sort of ritual or ‘magic’. If you accept this, then worshipping ‘love’ or ‘warfare’ or other god-forms is not a waste of time at all—the purpose and effect of prayer need not involve anything supernatural.
That … is a good point, actually. It doesn’t affect my argument—the one I elaborated with my Thom Yorke example—but it does complicate the situation in ways which should be acknowledged.
That’s very plausible.
[ETA: It sure is an expeditious way to interpret such statements, though.]
You’re right—best is to inquire for additional details when someone proposes such a statement.
I tried probing deeper (just out of curiosity) the first few times I was told ‘God is love/an energy/kindness/a force’, but found that my conversant usually had difficulty elaborating beyond the initial statement. There seemed to be some extra, hard to articulate component to what they thought but they were usually unwilling and/or unable to communicate it to me.
After a time I decided to just politely go ‘Hmmmm, I see’ and try changing the subject whenever someone equated God with something mundane in conversation. I think I must have started doing that mentally as well—hence why I take the statement at face value when I hear it.
That matches my experience as well—I think it is a necessarily supernatural description in the Carrier sense of the word, though, if it is to be taken at face value. It’s not like saying “God is Thom Yorke” (to pick the first name that comes to mind—I don’t even know who Thom Yorke is), and then cheerfully conceding that God is not, in fact, omnipotent or omniscient, etc. - the God-is-Love god still has the usual properties, just (or not “just”, depending) also that description.
Well, that might make for more interesting Gospels at least:
My brethren, be not anxious that Thom be absent or that this not come to pass (as in the Book of Kid A, Track 4); for recall as Thom sayeth, “there is nothing to fear, nothing to doubt” (Amnesiac, 2)— verily, in an interstellar burst he shall be back to save the universe (OK Computer, 1). Thou mayst not see him in the world as it is, this gunboat in a sea of fear (The Bends, 2), for Thom doth not belong here (Pablo Honey, 2). Repent of your sins, lest you go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking (In Rainbows, 3); steer away from those rocks of evil, or thou shalt be a walking disaster (Hail to the Thief, 9). Therefore immerse your soul in love (The Bends, 12) with all your will, for the best thou can is good enough (Kid A, 6) and Thom shalt see thee in the next life (Kid A, 10).
I suspect the original Gospels were similarly interesting to the early Christians—it’s just that we (most of us, anyway) don’t get the in-jokes any more.
I think you’re most likely correct. Now you’ve made me think about it, the God-is-Love gambit is probably just misdirection.
Note to self: be careful what I express polite indifference to, because that can turn into a thought pattern as well as a speech pattern.
Actually, I favor the “response to the Euthyphro Dilemma” theory—if God is Good, then what God loves must be Good by definition, not by contrivance, and the dilemma collapses.
That is, if you ignore the contrivance that is “God is Good”.
Could you elaborate on how the second part follows from God = good?
As I understand it, “goodness” is being used in a somewhat confusing way there, referring to not only outcomes in the world and the actions which lead to those outcomes, but also preferences or personality traits which lead to those actions. In other words, there is a set of mental qualities which results in preferable outcomes (good) and a set which does not (evil); God has all of the former qualities and none of the latter, therefore similarity to God can be taken as evidence of goodness and vice-versa.
The main practical difference from Friendly AI is that God is presumed to already exist.
I assume it’s supposed to work like mass-energy equivalence or something, but I don’t actually believe it, so I can’t say.
Heh, fair enough.
More rigorously, the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” must be in the map, not in the territory. As Aleister Crowley put it in his Book of Lies:
Ok, in that case just take the supernatural part out of the definition. Define God as some entity who did essentially what is ascribed to God in the Hebrew Bible. i.e. He created the Heavens and the Earth, etc.
I don’t have a paper copy of the Bible so I used this. I tried to read it from the beginning, but it didn’t make any sense. At first I thought ‘God’ must have been Hebrew for ‘Big Bang,’ but that didn’t fit. I can’t really work out what this ‘God’ would even be if it existed—it’s like trying to deduce what the Jabberwock is. So I guess God is about as likely to exist as slithy toves.
I’m confused again. Are you telling me you are an atheist?
About Hebrew Bible God? Of course! Unless you can think of some sensible way to interpret Genesis (and the rest of it) that hasn’t occurred to me and lets you salvage a God.
Do you understand that in the West, when people say they believe in God, they are normally referring to the God of Abraham?
And do you agree that there exists weak evidence for the existence of God?
That is what I thought when I was younger. In practice I’ve found that when talking to people in depth about their idea of God, they often have a slightly different idea of what God is supposed to be than other people I’ve spoken to.
Yes: a lot of people claim to have experienced God directly, which is weak evidence for God’s existence. (Assuming they’re all talking about essentially the same thing when they say ‘God,’ anyway.)
Sure; also there is hearsay documentary evidence (the Bible) and apparently even some scientific studies which supposedly demonstrate the power of prayer.
But by what standard do you reject such evidence?
Rejecting an interpretation of the evidence != rejecting evidence.
(Incidentally, I tried pulling up meta-analyses on the effect of prayer and found this Cochrane meta-analysis which finds no consistent effect of being prayed for on ill health.)
:shrug: By what standard do you evaluate this evidence so as to reach your atheistic conclusion notwithstanding this evidence for the existence of God?
The same standard I use to reach an a-homeopathic conclusion notwithstanding the evidence for homeopathy working, or an a-alien-abduction conclusion notwithstanding the evidence for people being beamed up and anally probed by aliens.
Namely, can I fit the idea of God existing/homeopathy working/alien abduction into my broader understanding of the world, or would it require overturning practically my whole understanding of how reality works?
So if I understand you correctly, there is no possible evidence which could convince you of the effectiveness of homeopathy, or the existence of God?
On the contrary, it is quite possible that there could be evidence that would convince me of either of those things. It is just that the evidence would have to be strong enough to go head-to-head with basic physics. If it could somehow be demonstrated that Avogadro’s number were 300 orders of magnitude too tiny, and that molecules were a googol times smaller than we thought, and could explain why our earlier experiments had led us to our original estimates of Avogadro’s number and molecular sizes, then that would tend make the effectiveness of homeopathy (more) plausible.
And by what standard would you decide whether the evidence is sufficiently strong?
My estimate of the probability of homeopathy working and the current laws of physics being very different would have to be of similar order to my estimate of the probability of the current laws of physics being correct.
And how do you come up with your probability estimates in a situation like this? Do you rely on your general knowledge and common sense? Do you have some algorithm you follow?
No, I don’t have a strict algorithm I follow in situations like this. What I actually do is probably more like this:
do some initial reading to get an idea of the basic plausibility of the hypothesis based on my background knowledge
let the hypothesis bounce around my mind for a while
try to spell out to myself the resulting gut feeling for the hypothesis’ probability
check that rough estimate for any gaping flaws
if that rough estimate is really low, reject the hypothesis as Too Unlikely To Debate for the time being (remember that ‘super careful’ warning I made a few posts up? This is where it applies)
if the rough estimate is instead very high, accept the hypothesis as Too Likely To Debate for the time being
if the probability estimate is more middling, and the hypothesis’ truthiness is important to me, gather more data and try to hone my hunch for the hypothesis’ probability
Fine, and using a similar method of estimating probabilities based on my knowledge, common sense, etc., I am satisfied that the difference in cognitive performance between blacks and whites results in large part from genetic differences.
In the same way that you are reasonably confident that God does not exist despite evidence to the contrary.
This statement is roughly equivalent to “My opinions on topic X are soundly arrived at”. Show, don’t tell.
In the instance, the blog where you said you were going to publish “evidence and arguments” in support of the above view has, to a first approximation, zero useful or interesting content at this time. Meanwhile you have wasted the time and attention of many LW readers as you submitted cupholder to an interrogation that would have tried anyone’s patience.
I wish you’d stop doing that.
Perhaps, but I set forth the basis of my reasoning in a blog post elsewhere. So I did more than simply assert a conclusion.
Since this branch of the discussion has fallen below the comment threshhold, I am happy to discuss things here.
In any event, would you apply the same criticism to cupholder’s atheism?
If you believe that what I stated was not useful or interesting, then you should not mind stipulating for the sake of argument that the facts I state there are correct. Agreed?
Unfortunately cupholder was rather evasive in our discussion. That’s his fault not mine.
Evidence please.
I see one answer to one of your questions in this atheism discussion that I answered in a cutesy way—though I still think my implication there was quite clear. For your other questions in this subthread I either replied in enough detail to answer your questions, where they were relevant (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8), or pointed out that your question was underspecified or had a false premise.
If you felt my answers to your questions were unsatisfactory, it would have been more helpful to have made that more explicit at the time, instead of working through your long-winded Socratic dialogue and taking an unsubstantiated potshot at me.
For example, consider this exchange:
Me: Sure; also there is hearsay documentary evidence (the Bible) and apparently even some scientific studies which supposedly demonstrate the power of prayer.
But by what standard do you reject such evidence?
You: Rejecting an interpretation of the evidence != rejecting evidence
Me: :shrug: By what standard do you evaluate this evidence so as to reach your atheistic conclusion notwithstanding this evidence for the existence of God?
It’s pretty obvious in this context what it means to “reject evidence,” but you chose an interpretation which let you avoid the question. i.e. you were evasive.
Anyway, I didn’t make an issue out of your evasiveness until somebody made an issue out of the length of our exchange.
Indeed, and that context happens to include this question preceding the first one you quoted there:
which implies that you thought there was a significant chance that I didn’t believe there was evidence of God. (Otherwise, why would you have bothered asking?) So when you subsequently implied that I ‘reject such evidence’ of God, it was quite reasonable to interpret it as literally just that—rejecting the evidence qua evidence—because you had just implied that you were open to the possibility that I denied evidence of God in general.
That’s nice.
Lol, you are being silly. We had both agreed that the evidence exists and then I asked why you rejected it. It was completely obvious what I meant.
You seem to be writing as if acknowledging the existence of evidence and rejecting evidence are mutually exclusive. Perhaps that is how you understand acknowledging that evidence exists v. rejecting evidence, but that’s a new understanding to me.
Apparently not.
Please either show me where I made such an implication by QUOTING me or admit I implied no such thing. Thank you.
I could be mistaken, but I think I already did.
Yes you are mistaken. If we both agree to X, it would make no sense for me to ask, in essence, why you believe in ~X.
I’m not asserting that you asked me if I believed there was no evidence of God (which is the ~X you have in mind, as far as I can tell). I’m asserting that you asked me whether I rejected evidence of God.
A second thing. It’s plain to me that at this point this argument is capable of going around in circles forever (if it hasn’t gone into a full-on death spiral already), and I’m not interested in engaging you on this point indefinitely. I’m not going to continue this subthread after this comment.
But according to you, I implied that rejecting evidence of God excludes the possibility of acknowledging the existence of that evidence.
However I made no such implication.
That’s fine . . . I don’t engage with people who strawman me.
Goodbye.
I’m not. This style of argumentation is ineffective and wasteful of people’s time, and I’m unhappy, bordering on angry, that it has gone on that long. I prefer to let this emotion find a productive outlet, namely a top-level post to put a name to the pattern I prefer, so as to encourage more useful discussions in future.
Claim. Unsupported by evidence.
Blame. Irrelevant to truth-seeking.
:shrug: Then don’t engage with me.
Would you like to see some evidence? I’m happy to provide it.
If blame is irrelevant to truth-seeking, then why are you accusing me (and not cupholder) of “wasting time and attention”?
Anyway, please answer my questions:
(1) Would you apply the same criticism to cupholder’s atheism?
(2) If you believe that what I stated was not useful or interesting, then you should not mind stipulating for the sake of argument that the facts I state there are correct. Agreed?
Never say this again. It’s a cheap, time-wasting dodge.
If you actually have evidence, simply lay it out as soon as it might be relevant.
I disagree with this. It takes time and energy to gather evidence. I don’t care to spend my time and energy digging up evidence unless somebody seriously throws down the gauntlet. Just stating “Claim. Unsupported by evidence” -- without indicating an interest in engaging—is not enough for me. Besides, it would have been easy enough for the poster to come back and say “yes, show me a quote please.”
This seems to imply that you already have the evidence, and are only waiting for confirmation that it’s wanted to provide it.
If this is relevant, it implies that you don’t have the evidence yet.
Please don’t imply that you have evidence when you don’t.
I would say that you are presenting what’s known as a “false dilemma,” i.e. your statement assumes that there are only two possibilities: either (1) I have the evidence in which case it costs me nothing to present it; or (2) I don’t in which case it is dishonest for me to offer to present evidence.
Of course there is another possibility, which is that I am reasonably confident I can present the evidence, but it will take me time and energy to gather and present it.
For example, suppose I bought a toaster a month ago; it breaks; I call up the store to get it fixed; and the store manager says “We can’t help you since you aren’t the original purchaser.” Before I spend 20 minutes finding the credit card receipt, I’m going to ask the guy “Would you like to see proof that I bought the toaster?”
If you don’t yet have evidence, it’s not dishonest to offer to find and present it, but it is dishonest to claim that you already have it, since by making that claim you’re claiming something that’s not true—namely that you have already confirmed that the evidence exists.
I don’t understand your point.
Is it dishonest to offer to present evidence when you are confident you can gather it?
For example, in the toaster scenario, is it dishonest to offer to produce proof that you bought the toaster? (Assume for the sake of argument that you save all of your receipts religiously and you are quite confident that you can produce the receipt if you are willing to take 20 minutes to rummage through your old receipts.)
If you offer it in such a way as to assert that you already have it, yes.
If I know that someone has a certain amount of evidence for a certain thing, then seeing that evidence myself doesn’t tell me much—knowing that the evidence exists is almost as good as gathering it myself. (This is what makes scientific studies work, so that people don’t have to test every theory by themselves.) But knowing that someone thinks that a certain amount of evidence exists for a certain thing is much weaker, and actually seeing the evidence in this case tells me much more, because it’s not particularly unusual for people to be wrong about this kind of thing, even when they claim to be certain. (Ironically, while I remember seeing a post on here that mentioned that when people were asked to give several 90%-likely predictions most of them managed to do no better than 30% correct, I can’t find it, so, case in point, I guess.)
I don’t think this is an accurate metaphor; human brains don’t work well enough for us to be that confident in most situations.
I don’t understand what you mean by “already have it.” If I know that I can pull the evidence up on my computer screen with about 60 seconds of work, do I “have” it? If the evidence is stored my hard drive, do I “have” it? If the evidence is on a web site which is publicly accessible, do I “have” it?
It sounds like your answer to my question is “no,” i.e. it would not be dishonest to offer to produce a receipt but that the example I described is extremely rare and non-representative. Do I understand you correctly?
If you spend more time arguing about definitions than it would take to present your facts and settle the original point, that constitutes evidence that your motive has little or nothing to do with the pursuit of mutual understanding.
Please either present the evidence you originally offered w/r/t the correlation between race and IQ, or desist in your protestations.
Before you go attacking my motives, maybe it would make sense to you to explain why you took us into meta-debate territory. You could have easily said something like this:
And yet you chose not to, instead launching a meta debate (actually a meta-meta debate). If anyone’s motives are suspect, it’s yours.
Lol, the evidence I offered to produce was that a certain poster was being evasive. Yes, that’s right—you started a meta-meta-debate.
As far as race and IQ goes, I laid out my case on my blog post. You are free read it carefully and then come back if you want evidence or other support for any aspect of it.
http://fortaleza84.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/the-race-and-iq-question/
I have read the post in question. The heart of your argument seems to be
Could you please provide some citations, with actual numbers, for “pretty much everywhere” and “various attempts,” including at least one study more recent than… let’s say 1987?
I could try to, but first you must comply with Rule 4 of my rules of debate.
First tell me that you are seriously skeptical that there is a black/white difference in cognitive abilities pretty much everywhere in the world.
Then tell me that you are seriously skeptical that various attempts to eliminate this gap have failed.
I am seriously skeptical that there is such a difference “pretty much everywhere,” that is, without variance along geographical, political, and economic lines.
“Various attempts have failed” taken literally means almost nothing; I am seriously skeptical that the gap has never been reduced as the result of any deliberate intervention.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. Of course there is variance in cognitive abilities (as well as differences in the size of the black/white gap) along geographical, political, and economic lines. And I am not claiming otherwise.
Well are you seriously skeptical that the gap has never been substantially eliminated?
An attempt to eliminate the gap could be considered successful in the long term if it resulted in consistent, cumulative reductions in the gap over time, without (yet) eliminating the gap outright. It’s cold comfort, like a cancer patient considered ‘cured’ because they died of something else first, but still worthy of recognition.
Then please either concede the point that the intelligence gap might be entirely explained by such factors, or provide a more detailed analysis of why it cannot be. For example, how much of the gap is due to differing economic opportunities, and corresponding issues of early childhood nutrition and education, resulting from discriminatory policies that were still legally enforced as of less than fifty years ago?
Well maybe so, but the question is what exactly you are seriously skeptical of. It sounds like you are not seriously skeptical of the claim that the black/white gap has never been substantially eliminated. Do I understand you correctly?
I address that in my blog post. And it sounds like you are not seriously skeptical of the claim that the black/white gap exists pretty much everywhere, you just dispute that it’s the same everywhere and you assert that other factors besides race have a general impact on cognitive abilities. Did I understand you correctly?
I disagree with you on points of fact (namely the causal mechanism behind a difference in intelligence between two subgroups of H. sapiens) about which you claim to have as-yet-unrevealed evidence. I will reply to you no further until you provide that evidence, preferably in the form of a peer-reviewed study published more recently than 1987 Q 4 conclusively supporting your hypothesis.
Furthermore, if you persist in dodging the question and playing games with ‘obviousness,’ I will take that as a sign of bad faith on your part, an attempt to manipulate me into saying something embarrassing.
:shrug: All I did was ask you simple questions so that I could understand exactly what it is you claim to be skeptical of.
I’m not going to waste time digging up citations for things which you don’t seriously dispute.
You are the one who is dodging questions.
I asked you two simple, reasonable yes or no questions in good faith so that I could understand your position. You ignored both of them.
Debating with me is not about playing “hide the ball” Before I gather evidence, I want to know exactly where we agree and disagree. You refuse to tell me. So be it.
ETA: By the way, it’s possible to be reasonably confident of various generalizations about human groups even without formal, peer-reviewed studies. I think this is pretty obvious, but I can give examples if anyone wants.
If the readers can’t understand what you’re referring to, the burden is on you to write more clearly. Furthermore, I object to your use of the word “Lol” in this context.
I see you cannot resist meta-debate.
Anyway, I would say it depends on how much effort and care those readers put into understanding. To any reasonable person, it was clear what I was referring to.
By the way, if you do want to debate this with me, you should know that I have my own rules of debate. You can find them here:
http://brazil84.wordpress.com/my-rules-of-debate/
In particular, you should pay attention to Rule 4.
Irrelevant obfuscation.
If you have already gathered the necessary evidence, present it without this teasing preamble; if not, admit your ignorance and lay out the probable search costs.
I think that when I asked “would you like to see some evidence,” the reasonable interpretation is that I can gather and present the evidence with a small but non-zero amount of effort.
However, if you did not understand my comment that way, that’s what I meant.
And again, it would have been easy enough for the other poster to say “Yes, I am skeptical of your claim and would like to see the evidence.” Since he didn’t do it, I infer that he doesn’t want to invest any further energy in the interaction. Which is fine, but if he doesn’t want to invest further energy, I don’t want to either.
No, you were aggressive and rude in the discussion. You have demanded a detailed answer while your questions weren’t clear, and in repeated queries you didn’t even try to explain what sort of answer you want. That all only to allow yourself to reply “well, I use the same standards”.
Can you please QUOTE me where I was aggressive and rude?
Can you please QUOTE a question I asked which was not clear?
Actually I said something like “similar” not “same.” But so what?
Your debating style resembles more an interrogation than a friendly discussion, and this I consider rude, but it may be only my personal feeling.
More importantly, you deliberately derailed the debate about racial differences in IQ asking about cupholder’s religious beliefs, while being apparently not interested in the question. It seemed to me that the purpose of the long debate was only to prepare positions for your final argument again about racial differences in IQ. This is also on my list of rude behaviour. I don’t like people asking questions in order to show that the opponent can’t answer appropriately.
If I ask a question and am not satisfied with the answer, the default is to suppose that the other person didn’t understood properly the question and my job is to explain it, or possibly give some motivation for it. Repeating the same question with only minimal alterations I consider aggresive. Want a quote?
I understand that you interpret it as a result of evasiveness of your opponent, but I simply disagree here. Cupholder has given two answers
which I find quite appropriate given your question. If you don’t, you should explain the question in more detail, because it is unclear. You have basically asked “what’s your epistemology”, itself a fine question, but full answer could fill a book. So either you wanted some specific answer, and the question was not clear—you should have asked more specifically. Or you didn’t want a specific answer, and since I don’t think you expected cupholder to explain his rationality in full detail, I must conclude that the question was merely rhetorical, which brings me back to rudeness.
Well, the atheism/theism issue is a decent example of a situation where it’s possible to be reasonably confident in a position without exhaustive scientific studies of the matter. And indeed, even if there are scientific studies going against your position.
As noted above, cupholder clearly chose an unreasonable interpretation of my question.
What exactly is the question I asked which is unclear?
Agreed, but I don’t understand the relevance.
I found all his interpretations (or what I think to be his interpretations) quite natural. Clearly we have conflicting intuitions. What interpretation did you have in mind, i.e. what type of answer you have expected?
It is too general to be answered in a concise comment. Therefore, when replying one has to either choose one particular aspect or be very vague.
As I recall, that’s one of the issues which was under discussion.
I claim that the two questions I quoted myself asking are essentially the same question:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1t48
Which question are you talking about?
So “reject the evidence” can mean 1) deny that the evidence exists and 2) not consider the evidence convincing. You find the interpretation 2) obvious and 1) unreasonable in the given context. Am I right? If so, well, after thinking about it for a while I admit that 2) is a lot better interpretation, but nevertheless I wouldn’t call the other one unreasonable, nor I suspect cupholder of deliberate misinterpretation; people sometimes interpret others wrongly.
The question by what standard you reject the evidence for the existence of God?
Pretty much yes.
I disagree, but at a minimum, it was hardly unreasonable for me to rephrase the question.
On the contrary; many people consider the issue settled because all major scientific debates in history, bar none, have ended up weighing against the notion of a personal God who takes an interest in and intervenes in human affairs.
(It is, rather, the persistence of the myth, and its influence on public affairs, that seems to demand scientific scrutiny!)
I don’t understand your point. Are you saying that scientific studies are necessary to resolve the theism/atheism question?
Yes. They are a) necessary and b) already done. (The “question” I have in mind is a specific one, that of a personal God who, etc. as stated above.)
Prior to, say, the invention of writing, it would perhaps have been legitimate to consider the existence of a personal God (or gods) an open question, susceptible of being settled by investigation. In fact under a hypothesis like Julian Jaynes’ humans about 3000 years ago might have had overwhelming evidence that Gods existed… yet they’d still have been mistaken about that.
Discovering this hypothesis makes reading this thread worthwhile. I’m shocked I hadn’t heard of it before. Maybe the coolest, most bizarre yet plausible idea I have heard in the last two years. Just hearing it (not even believing it) modifies my worldview. Have you or anyone else read the book? Recommended?
I’ve read the book, which was mentioned favorably in Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and forms part of the backstory to Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Curiosity compelled me to look further.
My level of understanding of the book’s thesis is mostly level-0, i.e. there is a “bicamerality” password but I’d have to reread the book to reacquaint myself with its precise predictions, and I’d be hard pressed to reconstruct the theory myself.
I do have a few pieces of understanding which seem level-2-ish; for instance, the hypothesis accounts for the feeling that a lot of my thinking is internal soliloquy. Also, the idea that consciousness, like love, could in large part be a “memetic” and collective construct (I use the term “meme” evocatively rather than rigorously) somehow appeals to me.
I’d recommend you read it if only for the pleasure of having one more person to discuss it with. I may have to reread it in that case.
Would you mind pointing me in the direction of the first such scientific study? Thanks in advance.
It would be futile to try and pinpoint the first chronologically, but for the one that most pointedly refuted a previously established truth, namely that “God made Man in His image”, I’d start with Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Though, actually, Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is probably a better starting point, for being a gloss on Darwin.
You should know, before you ask your next pseudo-Socratic question: given that you seem intent on sticking to that style of “argumentation”, I’m going to take your advice and not engage you anymore.
Ok, then how about an early one then.
So before the 19th century a rationalist could not reasonably conclude that the atheistic position is correct?
Do you really take this to be a reasonable interpretation / inference based on what Morendil said?
I think we might just have to stop feeding the troll.
Absolutely. The other poster claimed, in essence, that scientific studies are necessary to reach the atheistic conclusion. The implication is that before such studies were done, one could not reach that conclusion.
To be honest, before Darwin, the Argument from Design was a pretty good reason to be a theist. (And I got this from the aforementioned Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.)
Eh. The “who designed the designer” problem still makes theism a mistake. Hume even argued this before Darwin was born.
Yes, that’s a problem, but I don’t think it’s enough to make Deism ridiculous. Darwin was fortunate enough to find a “designer” that can exist without requiring a designer of its own, basically settling the question.
The existence of God has probably the lowest prior probability of any hypothesis ever seriously considered by humans. Further**, any evidence in favor of theism has been swamped by opposing evidence: evil, scientific explanations for nearly every phenomena previously attributed to God, evidence human brains are innately susceptible to believing in gods absent good evidence (and subsequent altering of the God hypothesis to account for the new evidence).
In contrast the hypothesis that the race iq gap is entirely or close to entirely environmental has a prior around .5 (lots of human differences are explained by environmental factors and lots are explained by genetics). What we have to update on consists of a handful of studies, several of which contradict each other and none of which have come close to controlling the relevant factors. We have good evidence the gap has shrunk since the Civil Rights movement, the taboo of overt racism and beneficial developments in African American social and economic position. Then there is some evidence the gap shrinks further when black children are raised by white families. There is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone. Mainstream science either holds that there is no genetic component or that the question is unresolved. Those who believe there is a genetic component will say that political correctness and egalitarianism mean that mainstream science would ignore evidence in favor of their position. Those who do not believe there is a genetic component will say that those who do are just trying to justify their racism. On balance, I update slightly in favor of the environmental hypothesis but there is enough uncertainty that the question needs more studying if we decide we care about it (I’m not sure we should).
The two cases aren’t even roughly comparable.
Now for the hundredth time, if you would like to share the knowledge that we don’t have that makes you so confident you are welcome to. Persisting in arguing without presenting such evidence is trollish and honestly, probably suggests to some that you don’t share their commitment to egalitarianism.
**Edited for clarification.
That’s not true at all. There is overwhelming evidence that performance on IQ tests is hugely correlated with “race”, which basically implies skin tone. Blacks, as a group, score 10-15 points below whites (almost a standard deviation), and (some) Asians and Jews are about half a deviation above whites.
The controversy is not whether there is correlation. The controversy is over the casual explanation. How much of this observed difference is due to genetics, how much due to environment, and how much due to the structure of standard IQ tests?
Just to clarify: the question is whether there is a genetic component to the observed difference in black/white (and other racial) group IQ scores.
There is clearly a genetic component to individual IQ scores.
This varies based on wealth. Among poor/impoverished peoples, variance in IQ scores is something like 60-90% due to environmental factors (like nutrition). Among wealthy peoples, 60-70% seems to be genetic.
The usual analogy is the height of growing corn. In nutrient-poor dirt, corn height is mostly a function of how much fertilizer/water/sun the plants get. But in well-tended farms, corn stalk height is almost completely a function of inherited genetics.
When I say there is zero net evidence that IQ correlates with skin tone I’m summarizing the findings of the skin tone studies cited in the Nisbett article that was heavily discussed in this conversation. The studies examined IQ among blacks and found that whether the person was light-skinned or dark-skinned had more or less no bearing on that person’s IQ (the assumption being that skin tone is a rough proxy for degree of African descent). I think this was obvious at the time from the context of the paragraph: I’m clearly summarizing findings not making general conclusions (until the end). We had been going back and forth on these issues for a while so by that point I was probably using more shorthand than usual. It may not be obvious that is what I was doing a month after the fact.
Yes, I’m pretty sure the context is more that sufficient to establish that this is what I was talking about. The entire discussion was about origin of the black-white IQ gap.
Being more precise (pedantic?), Nisbett wrote:
Assuming that correlation’s not a chance fluctuation, that would imply that there is a positive correlation between skin tone and IQ. But a meager one.
At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say “zero net evidence” but I honestly don’t remember what my reasoning was.
We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn’t mean some of the IQ gap is genetic. There have been studies demonstrating social advantages to having light skin.
That’s reasonable; that you were mentally weighing up Nisbett’s claim against conflicting evidence hadn’t occurred to me.
Wholly agreed.
Does anyone happen to have any studies that report different findings? This isn’t a subject where I trust one source. I know how to lie with studies.
Yeah, I don’t know how to update on meta analyses anymore. I do know though that Ruston and Jensen cite it uncritically (albeit deceptively, they just acknowledge the low correlation and move on) which may be evidence that Shuey (who did the meta analysis) is being honest.
Edit: The other thing I don’t trust is that the Shuey analysis of the 18 studies was done in 1966! I’m not sure studies on race from that period are reliable in either direction.
Wow. Just how well did they correct for all external factors? I would have expected a difference in measured IQ to appear based purely on socio-economic disadvantages that are far lesser now.
I’m not sure studies on race from that period are reliable in either direction.
I’m not sure how the political bias / scientific integrity ratio then compares to now. I do suppose that some parties would be particularly interested in finding that result at that time.
To say the least.
I read through the chapter. Interesting.
Not being an American I have been exposed to different kinds of discrimination stories, both historic and current. I’m also not sure how relevant the original study would be here, unless there is actually a direct relationship between skin pigmentation and IQ. Prior to European settlement the people in Australia were isolated for tens of thousands of years, leaving skin tone a relatively poor indicator of genetic kinship. That is a lot of time for selection to work on both IQ and pigmentation.
As you point out, it isn’t safe to assume that skin tone reflects ancestry in every case. I think the race scientists implicitly reason that it’s OK to treat skin tone as an ancestry indicator among US blacks because of the relatively recent injection of African ancestry into the US gene pool, so skin tone’s association with African ancestry hasn’t been wholly eliminated/confounded yet. The same obviously wouldn’t apply to indigenous Australians.
Looked deeper. 1966 is the 2nd edition. The first was 1958. The book both Nisbett and Rushton are citing is titled “The Testing of Negro Intelligence”. From what little I can find Shuey was actually something of an early Rushton, arguing that a persistent test score gap since 1910 suggested innate intelligence differences between races. If anyone can find and electronic copy of the book let me know.
You’ll be lucky to find a copy. The book probably falls into that mid-century obscurity zone, old enough to be forgotten but not old enough to be public domain.
If it helps, the 1975 book Race Differences in Intelligence takes Shuey’s results on skin color and IQ and adapts 5 of the studies she found into a table. Looking at the table, the studies are quite a mish-mash. Three report correlation coefficients, and the other two instead report average IQ for different categories of mixed ancestry people (‘Light skin’ v. ‘Dark skin’, and ‘Strong evidence of white’ v. ‘Intermediate’ v. ‘Dominantly Negroid’). The studies date from 1926 to 1947, and the 1947 study’s an unpublished dissertation. Each study used a different IQ test. I can only imagine there’s even more variation among Shuey’s full collection of studies.
Not really a reply to you. I just found this and needed to put it somewhere. Anyone who has been following this discussion will be interested. It’s an interesting way of posing the question.
...
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Hsu’s blog post makes two claims about race. The first argument is that ‘Hypothesis 2’ could be correct—i.e., that there could be genetically driven differences in exciting traits like IQ between races (or ‘groups,’ but I think we all know which ‘groups’ we’re really interested in). I agree with this argument.
I completely disagree with the second claim, which is that genetic clustering studies constitute ‘the scientific basis for race.’ It’s true that scientists can extract clusters from genetic data that match what we call races. If you gave me a bunch of human genotypes sampled from around the world and let me fuck around with that data and run it through PCA for a few hours, I’m sure I could do the same. But it doesn’t automatically follow that my classification is correct.
For example, if you sample some whites, sample some blacks, and expect those two categories to automatically pop out of your analysis, you might be surprised. Here’s a recent paper that estimated the European ancestry in African-Americans by analyzing genotypes from samples of US whites, US blacks, and several subgroups of Africans. Running PCA on all of the genotype data, and plotting the first two principal components of the subjects’ genotypes in each sample gave these clusters:
If we treat the widely separated clusters as races, we don’t automatically recover a black race and a white race. We end up with a Mandenka race, a white race, and a Bantu + Yoruba race, with African-Americans smeared out between them.
The researchers could no doubt have come up with an alternative rotation of the axes that would’ve projected all of the African samples on top of each other, and the European sample far away from them. But what would justify the alternative projection over the original one?
Maybe my own personal concept of ‘race’ emphasizes differences among sub-Saharan Africans, instead of continental differences. Then I might do a PCA on a set of sub-Saharan African genotypes, find a couple of principal components that best separate out the sub-Saharan African subgroups, and only then plot the north Africans and non-Africans along with the sub-Saharans.
Here are a few plots from a study that did just that. Notice now that the most widely separated clusters are three, or perhaps four, sub-Saharan African clusters—and the rest of the world forms one little cluster in the middle of them!
If I were a scientist who had started with the idea that the main races consisted of several African subgroups, plus one other race containing all non-Africans, this analysis would seem to completely vindicate my initial beliefs! But the analysis turned out the way it did mainly because the way I did it was driven by my original taxonomy of ‘races.’
I’ve picked out two papers myself to make points, now I’ll write a bit about the ‘Risch et al.’ paper Hsu points to. Risch et al. calculated genetic clusters by running data collected for the Family Blood Pressure Program through the structure program. Hsu writes that the clusters that emerged ‘correspond very well to self-identified notions of race.’
Well, there’s no ready-made algorithm which takes genotypes as input and spits out objectively determined races, and structure is no exception. There are some subtleties to how the program works. For one thing, it doesn’t automatically confirm an optimal number of clusters and then sort the subjects into the appropriate number of clusters: the researcher tells structure to put subjects into some number k of clusters, and the program then does its best to fit the subjects into k clusters. So the fact that structure’s output contained an intuitively pleasing number of clusters doesn’t mean very much.
Another issue is that the kind of model structure uses to represent distributions of genotypes is suboptimal for cases where samples have been isolated due to distance and have suffered a lack of gene flow. But, if Hsu is correct, this is exactly the case for Risch et al.‘s data, since he writes that Risch et al.‘s ‘clustering is a natural consequence of geographical isolation, inheritance and natural selection operating over the last 50k years since humans left Africa!’
There is more I could write, but I might as well just link this book chapter, which discusses issues with trying to algorithmically infer someone’s racial ancestry. I’ve already written more than I meant to—sorry for the lecture—but it disappoints me when someone well-credentialed (a professor of physics!) uncritically waves around ambiguous results to shore up a folk model of race.
(Edited to fix last link.)
I’m typing this on an iPad so apologies for mistakes. A picture for you here:
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/06/genetic-clustering-40-years-of-progress.html
Yes, there are clines, but so what? The population fraction in the clinal region between the major groups is tiny.
The distance (e.g. measured by fst) between the continental groups is so large that you would have to stand on your head to not “discover” those as separate clusters.
See also here http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/11/human-genetic-variation-fst-and.html
I’m not sure that this contradicts what I wrote. I acknowledge that high-resolution genotyping enables one to distinguish geographically distant samples of people. Being able to pull that off does not automatically validate ‘race,’ as in the conventional white people v. yellow people v. brown people v. red people taxonomy.
Or you need only come at the data with an unusual preconception of race, which would affect your analytic approach.
Also, if you take wide-ranging genetic samples across Africa (as opposed to using a handful of samples from one Nigerian city to represent all of Africa, as seems to have been done to derive your picture), it seems to me that you end up getting African clusters that can be as far apart from each other as they are from Europeans.
Another example: check out subdiagram A in this diagram, from a paper that took samples from West and South Africa. The Fulani + Bulala are as far apart from some of the other African samples as they are from the Europeans!
I doubt this would be the case as measured by fst. Note that distance on a principal components graph is not the same as fst: the components might be optimized to separate the clusters of choice (optimize the directions in gene space which show the most variance between the groups). It’s possible in principle that some groups (e.g., pygmies) in Africa have been as effectively separated in gene flow from other Africans as, say, Nigerians and Europeans. More likely, the fst distance between any two groups of Africans is less than the distance from the Yoruba to Europeans or E. Asians. That is what happens when you analyze the (better studied) sub-population structure of, e.g., Europe and Asia. That is, no two groups in E. Asia are anywhere near as far apart as they are collectively from Europeans (and the same for any two European groups vs distance to Asia). That’s just what you’d expect from the historical gene flow patterns, and I’d expect it to apply to Africa as well.
The real question is whether folk notions of ethnicity map onto clusters in gene space. If they do (and they do) it implies different frequency distributions for alleles in the groups. That raises the possibility of statistical group differences. What those differences are remains to be determined.
I agree on the subject of Fst; if you switch from PCA biplots to Fst, that’s going to better emphasize differences due to geographical separation. (But likely still not enough to scientifically confirm a classical racial taxonomy as the one true racial taxonomy. One would still have to decide which samples to use to build one’s Fst matrix and address the issue of how to extract racial categories from the Fst matrix. I’d also anticipate getting caught up in the same sort of issues as the structure program.)
Folk notions of ethnicity arguably could, because they are far more squishy and pliable than folk notions of race.
I can’t help feeling that you believe I’m arguing against the validity of race because I think that disproves the possibility of statistical group differences. If so, you can rest easy. I acknowledge the possibility of statistical group differences—it doesn’t live or die by the validity of race. I see (or think I do, anyway) genetic group differences in (relatively) boring traits like skin color and hair color—and if those, why not genetic group differences in drama-provoking traits like IQ, personality or genital size?
OK, so we just differ in nuances of definition. If you prefer ethnicity to race, that’s fine with me.
The usual lame argument is “race doesn’t exist, so how could there be group differences”—but I think neither of us is arguing that side.
Well, for whatever it’s worth, I continue to disagree with one of the arguments in the blog entry I mentioned—there is more here than a minor semantic divide.
Correct.
So your position is that there are probably allele clusters do to cultural and geographic isolation (and therefore potentially group differences in IQ or personality) your concern is that you don’t think those clusters have been shown to map one to one with our folk racial categories?
Do you think our folk racial categories aren’t the product of observable phenotypes? Do you think those categories at least approximate a valid scientific taxonomy?
My concern (or at least the one that I’m elaborating on in this thread) is that those clusters can be made to map onto folk racial categories, or made to be only partly consistent with folk racial categories, or made to be contradictory to folk racial categories, depending upon how one’s own preconceptions of race color one’s cluster analyses.
No.
Valid for which scientific purpose? They are likely to be workable categories for a sociologist studying race relations. They are likely to be inadequate categories for a molecular anthropologist studying human genetic variation. Though I expect some molecular anthropologists (and evidently at least one professor of physics) would dispute that.
Here of all places this is unnecessary. I posted the link specifically hoping someone would respond like this.
If we’re discovering clusters that don’t fit with our racial preconceptions that is evidence the clusters that do match some of our racial preconceptions aren’t bullshit. Also, aren’t we looking for genetic evidence of cultural and geographical isolation? Isn’t the fact that we see different clusters for different groups in Africa just evidence that those groups have been (reproductively) isolated for a really long time? I would predict from these findings that when humans first left the continent there were already distinct groupings and that not all of these grouping had descendants that left Africa.
Also, from the chart posted here I would predict that the Africans kidnapped and purchased as slaves came more from the Yoruba and much less so from the Mandenka. They probably didn’t all come from the Yoruba, perhaps the others came from the groups in the upper right corner of this chart that you linked in your other comment. Or perhaps they didn’t come from the Yoruba but others in that corner and the Yoruba are just closely related to those other groups.
EDIT: So there were a lot of tribes that had members become slaves. Like nearly every major tribe appears to have been affected. I’m going to have to find something that tells me proportions which will take longer.
From your other comment on that chart.
If you go search for pictures of both you can notice the phenotype differences as well.
I’ll maybe say more after I look at that chapter.
Mission accomplished! :-)
Sounds reasonable.
It can be, although variation along principal component axes can also represent genetic change due to migration. (I picked up on this potential confound by reading a Nature Genetics paper that made the same point from the opposite direction. That is, variation along a PC can be due to continuous geographic separation instead of migration.)
That’s looks about right to me. Table 1 from the paper estimating African ancestry gives a detailed breakdown of the African ancestry of the African-American sample, and it fits what you suggest.
Surely you mean ‘likelihood’ here, not prior probability. Prior probabilities are imputed based on one’s uncertainty before any evidence is taken into account, and theism scores fairly high on this metric.
The selection should be read something like:
(Due to complexity)
In addition, the hypothesis does not become more likely once we consider the evidence...
“Due”, not “do”.
Also, I think the confusion merely arises from arrangement and Gricean-maxim(-like?) considerations—I predict adding “Further” before “[a]ny evidence” would suffice to invoke the correct interpretation.
You’re obviously right on both counts. Edited.
Remember to flag the edit—I like the footnote method.
The fundamental similarity is that it’s possible to be reasonable confident of a conclusion based on general knowledge, common sense, and despite scientific studies to the contrary.
Lol, you have all the knowledge necessary to come to the same conclusion as I have. Surely you are aware that the cognitive gap between blacks and whites is essentially universal and intractable*. In both time and space, as far as anyone knows. While at the same time, other explanations offered for the gap are not so.
There is only one reasonable inference from these facts. One simple explanation which is not inherently ridiculous.
*I agree that the gap can be lessened to some extent since black children face the environmental disadvantage of being raised by black parents.
This is true. It’s also possible to be way too overconfident, based on these same things, and unacknowledged confounders. This is the problem that scientific studies try to address.
Agree.
Well, that and other things as well.
If I recall correctly, there are studies that demonstrate the power of believing one is being prayed for, whether or not one actually is. In studies where the people being prayed for don’t know about it, there is no significant difference.
The largest study I know of found the opposite effect: people who knew they were being prayed for had slightly worse health outcomes.
I did a google search and found this, among other things:
http://scientificinquiry.suite101.com/article.cfm/pray-for-me