Average cranial capacity in Europeans is about 1362; 1380 in Asians, 1276 in Africans. It’s about 1270 in New Guinea.
What’s wrong here? 4 degrees of accuracy for brain size and no error bars? That’s a sign of someone being either intentionally or unintentionally dishonest.
Quick Googling shows that there’s a paper published that states that European’s average cranial capacities is 1347.
Rather then describing the facts as they are he paints things as more certain than they are. I think that people who do that in an area, where false beliefs lead to people being descrimited, are in no position to complain when they some social scorn.
Quick Googling shows that there’s a paper published that states that European’s average cranial capacities is 1347.
That’s close enough to not effect his point, or even the order. I think you’re engaging in motivated continuing to avoid having to acknowledge conclusions you find uncomfortable.
Rather then describing the facts as they are he paints things as more certain than they are. I think that people who do that in an area, where false beliefs lead to people being descrimited, are in no position to complain when they some social scorn.
Do you also apply the same criticism to the (much larger number of) people how make (much larger errors) in the direction of no difference? Also, could you taboo what you mean by “descrimited”. Steelmanning suggests you mean “judged according to inaccurate priors”, yet you also seem be implying that inaccurately equaliterian priors aren’t a problem.
This gets back to the issue that neither you nor Christian have defined what you mean by “discrimination”. I gave one definition: “judged according to inaccurate priors”, according to which your comment is false. If you want to use some other definition, please state it.
Why would you think we are not using it in the standard sense? “Discrimination is the prejudicial and/or distinguishing treatment of an individual based on their actual or perceived membership in a certain group or category”
By that reasoning, refusing to hire someone who doesn’t have good recommendations, is discrimination, because you’re giving him distinguishing treatment (refusing to hire him) based on membership in a category (people who lack good recommendations).
I think you have some assumptions that you need to make explicit, after thinking them through first. (For instance, one obvious change is to replace “category” with “irrelevant category”, but that won’t work.)
Well, the recommendations you have are to some extent the result of your choices and actions, but whether your name sounds black hardly is. So, regret-of-rationality considerations apply more to the former than to the latter.
So you are saying that I should modify the definition of “discrimination” supplied by TAG, to include a qualifier “only as a result of your choices and actions”?
That seems to say that some forms of religious discrimination don’t count (choosing not to convert to Christianity is a result of your own choices and actions). It also ignores the fact that it is possible for someone to fall into a group where some of the group’s members got there by their own choices and actions but some don’t—not every person who can’t get good recommendations is in that situation because of his own choices and actions. In fact, there’s a continuum; what if, say, 10% of the people in a category got there by their own choices and actions but the other 90% had no choice?
That would still mean that if I say “convert to Christianity or I won’t hire you” and you refuse, that wouldn’t count as discrimination. It would also mean that refusing to hire gay people would not be discrimination, as long as you only refused to hire people who participated in some activity, whether having gay sex, wearing rainbow flags, having a gay wedding, etc.
That would still mean that if I say “convert to Christianity or I won’t hire you” and you refuse, that wouldn’t count as discrimination.
So what? I’m not particularly outraged that atheists aren’t allowed into the Swiss Guards.
It would also mean that refusing to hire gay people would not be discrimination, as long as you only refused to hire people who participated in some activity, whether having gay sex, wearing rainbow flags, having a gay wedding, etc.
For some reason, this sounds more problematic to me; not sure why.
For some reason, this sounds more problematic to me; not sure why.
Probably because you’ve been more exposed to rhetoric saying how horrible it is to be “anti-gay” than rhetoric saying how horrible it is to be “anti-atheist”.
You realize this is circling back around, right? The issue is that the two are both defined by choices, because the second group is not gay men but men who have consensual sex with men, and the second group’s membership is voluntary regardless of whether or not the first’s is.
Eugine_Nier responded, in effect, that the most likely reason to see those restrictions as being in different classes is the “who—whom?” of religious hiring restrictions being ‘okay’ and sexual-behavior-based hiring restrictions being ‘not okay’ because of status alignments of religion and sexual behavior.
I’m not sure there’s a coherent one here. But for issues such as this, what people, or society are comfortable with is a to a large extent a function of what intuitions they have. In this sort of context, the distinction is likely connected to intuitions of free will, whether or not that makes any sense.
How a priori reason do you want it to be? There’s at this point a general consensus that sexual orientation, while culturally mediated, has a large genetic component. I don’t think that anyone thinks there’s say a gene for Christianity or the like. And while self-identified sexual orientation can change, that’s substantially less common an occurrence as changes in one’s religious self-identification. For example, in the US about half of all adults have changed their religion at least once in their lives. See here. Some of those people are people changing from one version of Protestantism to another, but even when you take them out, one is still talking about around a third of the population. And this is fairly well known- people understand that religious beliefs can change: indeed, many major religions have specific rules about how to handle conversions, and many forms of major religions (especially in Christianity and Islam) have active commandments to go and convert people.
Well, I guess Jews and Wiccans would be as reluctant to get baptised in order to get a job as atheists are—possibly more so, insofar as I can easily imagine the latter thinking ‘if a lie is what you want, a lie is what you’ll get’ (there was a comment somewhere on LW to that effect, but I can’t find it).
I’m not aware of any ‘consensus’ that sexual orientation has a ‘large’ genetic component. Some research suggests there is a genetic component, and it is known that there are developmental factors as well (i.e. what happens in the womb and afterwards) and also environmental factors. It is widely accepted that homosexuality is ‘not a (conscious) choice’ but that’s most definitely not the same as saying “it’s genetic”.
See other discussion in this subthread for evidence that there’s a large genetic component and that most papers in this context matter. I agree that there’s likely developmental and environmental issues at play, as well as stochastic effects.
There’s at this point a general consensus that sexual orientation, while culturally mediated, has a large genetic component.
And near as I can tell, the only things underlying this consensus are the “we can get it to show up on brain scans, therefore it must be genetic” fallacy and the accusation of being an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!!1!! hurled against anyone who questions it.
And near as I can tell the only things underlying this consensus are the “we can get it to show up on brain scans, therefore it must be genetic” fallacy and the accusation of being an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!!1!! hurled against anyone who questions it.
The brain evidence is interesting, but it goes more to a lack of choice, rather than a genetic aspect. Of course, as with any complicated behavioral trait with some variation, it is likely that at least part of the trait is due to environmental effects at a young age, possibly including womb environment.
The fact that the kind of people responsible for these kinds of consensuses believe it is perfectly acceptable to promote falsehoods under the name of science for the “greater good” doesn’t exactly increase my confidence in it.
And you are A) Linking to a discussion where you and I already discussed exactly this and why your response didn’t make sense, and B) making a massive leap that from some political groups presenting selective evidence, that one should therefore doubt scientific studies. This does not follow.
The page you linked to doesn’t exactly present evidence of a strong genetic component (or much of a consensus for that matter).
The brain evidence is interesting, but it goes more to a lack of choice, rather than a genetic aspect.
Except it’s not evidence of lack of choice (unless you adopt a very specific kind of Cartesian dualism) either.
And you are A) Linking to a discussion where you and I already discussed exactly this and why your response didn’t make sense,
Your reasoning was basically “everyone lies thus some political group lying isn’t evidence against their other claims”. Not a particularly strong argument at the best of times, certainly not here were the situation is extremely analogous to the lie at the link (just substitute “transgender” for “homosexuality”).
B) making a massive leap that from some political groups presenting selective evidence, that one should therefore doubt scientific studies.
It wasn’t just presenting selective evidence, it was getting BS or outright lies declared part of the scientific consensus.
The page you linked to doesn’t exactly present evidence of a strong genetic component (or much of a consensus for that matter).
Could you elaborate? For example, the estimate from the largest study in the page (3,826 pairs) seems pretty nontrivial: 39% of variance! That’s not small or trivial by any means—that’s getting up there with some twin estimates of intelligence. And especially since the shared-environment estimate is 0.
The page you linked to doesn’t exactly present evidence of a strong genetic component (or much of a consensus for that matter).
Of the studies in question, the only one which showed a weak correlation listed is Bearman and Brückner, which still showed a 7.7% concordance rate for male homosexuality. The female rate is lower, which shouldn’t be that surprising, given that the other studies included also showed lower concordance rates for females, and that there’s other evidence for female sexuality being more malleable than male sexuality. Moreover, the largest study in question, the Sweden study, used literally every single pair of twins born in the country, which makes for a much larger study and handles the selection bias problems. And that study agreed with the results of the other studies excepting Bearman and Bruckner.
The brain evidence is interesting, but it goes more to a lack of choice, rather than a genetic aspect.
Except it’s not evidence of lack of choice (unless you adopt a very specific kind of Cartesian dualism) either.
What does this have to do with Cartesian dualism at all? For that matter, how is this at all relevant, since as I stated earlier, the matter under discussion is what is descriptively thought of as a choice or not by members of society. The entire point was discussing why someone would have a different reaction to the homosexuality discrimination issue than the atheism discrimination issue. In that context, colloquial intuitive notions of choice are relevant.
Your reasoning was basically “everyone lies thus some political group lying isn’t evidence against their other claims”. Not a particularly strong argument at the best of times, certainly not here were the situation is extremely analogous to the lie under discussion (just substitute “transgender” for “homosexuality”).
That’ isn’t what the argument is. Please reread that discussion.
It wasn’t just presenting selective evidence, it was getting BS or outright lies declared part of the scientific consensus.
Really? Did you see any evidence in that discussion that any aspect of this has had any influence on the scientific studies in question? Have they somehow managed to fake data and get it through? Do you think they’ve had papers get rejected? The only plausible sort of situation is selective granting, which requires specific aspects of the LGBTQE movement (not even generically but people who would agree with this lying idea, which the vast majority would not) to have somehow gotten positions in grant giving institutions. Do you have any evidence for that?
which still showed a 7.7% concordance rate for male homosexuality
In isolation, this number tells us nothing. What is important is the gap between concordance rates for MZ, DZ, and siblings. There are several popular hypotheses that predict a large effect of prenatal environment. In fact, the particular paper give 7.7% MZ, 4.2% DZ, and 4.5% siblings, so it detects no effect of prenatal environment and does suggest genetics.
The brain evidence is interesting, but it goes more to a lack of choice, rather than a genetic aspect.
Except it’s not evidence of lack of choice (unless you adopt a very specific kind of Cartesian dualism) either.
What does this have to do with Cartesian dualism at all?
Unless you accept some form of Cartesian dualism you should expect every aspect of the mind to show up on sufficiently advanced brain scans, whether or not it is a choice. Thus, the brain evidence isn’t particularly interesting.
For that matter, how is this at all relevant, since as I stated earlier, the matter under discussion is what is descriptively thought of as a choice or not by members of society.
And my point is that this perception isn’t grounded in anything objective and thus itself needs an explanation.
Your reasoning was basically “everyone lies thus some political group lying isn’t evidence against their other claims”. Not a particularly strong argument at the best of times, certainly not here were the situation is extremely analogous to the lie under discussion (just substitute “transgender” for “homosexuality”).
That’ isn’t what the argument is. Please reread that discussion.
I have, twice in the last few days in fact. Why don’t you try rereading it?
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume I misunderstood your argument there, if so could you state it more explicitly.
Really? Did you see any evidence in that discussion that any aspect of this has had any influence on the scientific studies in question?
Well Julian practically admitted it.
Have they somehow managed to fake data and get it through? Do you think they’ve had papers get rejected?
Sometimes, generally pressure is applied to people who produce politically incorrect results. Look what happened to Mark Regnerus or Jason Richwine, or to use a more famous example James Watson.
Eugine, within 2 minutes of your comment above, I received a block downvote to all my recent comments regardless of subject. Given this thread, which I presume you must have already seen, my interest in whether this was your action should be clear. If you are attempting to simply ignore the issues, you may want to be aware that this is causing serious concerns and problems within the community, and at least one LW user has considered implementing a response of block downvoting all your comments and those of people with views similar to your own. This situation is creating a mindkilling political mindfield and it is in your and everyone else’s best interest for it to be headed off before the situation deteriorates. Therefore a straight answer from you as to whether you are involved in this would be both appreciated and in the best interest of the community.
If you think you can get away with ignoring ialdabaoth’s requests because of the user’s relatively low status, you should be aware that my own status on LW, while not very high, is likely not so low that simply ignoring me will be a remotely productive response.
You have made some valid points above, but I cannot given recent events discuss them or any other issue with you, until you address the community’s concerns here.
I would like to loudly add that I am very interested in the norms of polite discourse being followed on LW, and am throwing whatever status I have behind this request. Furthermore, if this turns out to be the sort of thing that is best resolved in PMs rather than comments, I am willing to facilitate conversations that way.
Attempted to reverse the effects of the block downvote. Note that any permanent solution to this problem cannot rely on the co-operation of possible defectors. If there is not a method for detecting such defections and preferably determing the source, it continues to be a viable method of asymmetric warfare.
Also might be a decent idea for someone to take formal responsibility for moderating the website. Several people have moderator powers, but I do not know of anyone who is actually responsible for such moderation. (It seems that this would fall to Eliezer by default, but this does not seem to be Eliezer’s comparative advantage.)
ETA: A designated moderator is necessary even with a system such as I described in place since the automated detection can screw up. A human overseer spending, say, an hour on this each week, may be greatly productive if thy have the appropriate tools available.
I didn’t relaise that “falsehood” meant “not necessarily true”. I also remain unclear why a statment as guarded “believed to have a genetic component” would need to be qualiied with a further “maybe”.
Wikipedia is supposed to use what’s in the sources. They’re not allowed to steelman.
It may just mean “group or category which I like”, but I wouldn’t count that as steelmanning.
The best I can come up with is “group or category which has, in the past, often been subject to inaccurately negative judgment based on inaccurate priors”. In fact, let’s try that one.
That’s close enough to not effect his point, or even the order. I think you’re engaging in motivated continuing to avoid having to acknowledge conclusions you find uncomfortable.
Claiming 4 degrees of accuracy means, claiming that the factor of uncertainity about the difference is off by a factor of more than ten.
Understanding the uncertainity that exist in vital for reasoning effectively about what’s true.
Do you also apply the same criticism to the (much larger number of) people how make (much larger errors) in the direction of no difference?
Different people have different goals. If your goal is the search for truth than it matters greatly whether what you speaking is true.
If your goal is to spread memes that produce social change than it makes sense to use different criteria.
What does discrimination mean? If a job application with a name that common with black people gets rejected while an identical one with a name that’s common with white people gets accepted that would be an example of bad discrimination.
If a job application with a name that common with black people gets rejected while an identical one with a name that’s common with white people gets accepted that would be an example of bad discrimination.
Does it matter if having said name is in fact correlated with job performance?
Only if it’s still correlated when you control for anything else on the CV and cover letter, incl. the fact that the candidate is not currently employed by anyone else.
Does it matter if having said name is in fact correlated with job performance?
Being correlated isn’t very valuable in itself. Even if you do believe that blacks on average have a lower IQ, scores on standardized test tell you a lot more about someone IQ.
The question would be whether the name is a better predictor of job performance than grades to distinguish people in the population of people who apply or whether the information that comes from the names adds additional predictive value.
But even if various proxies of social status would perform as predictors I still value high social mobility. Policies that increase it might not be in the interest of the particular employeer but of interest to society as a whole.
The question would be whether the name is a better predictor of job performance than grades to distinguish people in the population of people who apply or whether the information that comes from the names adds additional predictive value.
Emphasis mine. I don’t think this is the question at all, because you also have the grade information; the only question is if grades screen off evidence from names, which is your second option. It seems to me that the odds that the name provides no additional information are very low.
To the best of my knowledge, no studies have been done which submit applications where the obviously black names have higher qualifications in an attempt to determine how many GPA points an obviously black name costs an applicant. (Such an experiment seems much more difficult to carry out, and doesn’t have the same media appeal.)
So, this “only question” formulation is a little awkward and I’m not really sure what it means. For my part I endorse correctly using (grades + name) as evidence, and I doubt that doing so is at all common when it comes to socially marked names… that is, I expect that most people evaluate each source of information in isolation, failing to consider to what extent they actually overlap (aka, screen one another off).
So, this “only question” formulation is a little awkward and I’m not really sure what it means.
ChristianKI brought up the proposition “(name)>(grades)” where > means that the prediction accuracy is higher, but the truth or falsity of that proposition is irrelevant to whether or not it’s epistemically legitimate to include name in a decision, which is determined by “(name+grades)>(grades)”.
I doubt that doing so is at all common when it comes to socially marked names
Doing things correctly is, in general, uncommon. But the shift implied by moving from ‘current’ to ‘correct’ is not always obvious. For example, both nonsmokers and smokers overestimate the health costs of smoking, which suggests that if their estimates became more accurate, we might see more smokers, not less. It’s possible that hiring departments are actually less biased against people with obviously black names than they should be.
if their estimates became more accurate, we might see more smokers, not less
...insofar as their current and future estimates of health costs are well calibrated with their actual smoking behavior, at least. Sure.
It’s possible that hiring departments are actually less biased against people with obviously black names than they should be.
Well, it’s odd to use “bias” to describe using observations as evidence in ways that reliably allow more accurate predictions, but leaving the language aside, yes, I agree that it’s possible that hiring departments are not weighting names as much as they should be for maximum accuracy in isolation… in other words, that names are more reliable evidence than they are given credit for being.
That said, if I’m right that there is a significant overlap between the actual information provided by grades and by names, then evaluating each source of information in isolation without considering the overlap is nevertheless a significant error.
Now, it might be that the evidential weight of names is so great that the error due to not granting it enough weight overshadows the error due to double-counting, and it may be that the signs are such that double-counting leads to more accurate results than not double-couting. Here again, I agree that this is possible.
But even if that’s true, continuing to erroneously double-count in the hopes that our errors keep cancelling each other out isn’t as reliable a long-term strategy as starting to correctly use all the evidence we have.
That said, if I’m right that there is a significant overlap between the actual information provided by grades and by names, then evaluating each source of information in isolation without considering the overlap is nevertheless a significant error.
Agreed. Any sort of decision process which uses multiple pieces of information should be calibrated on all of those pieces of information together whenever possible.
It’s even possible that if the costs of smoking are overestimated, more people should be smoking—part of the campaign against smoking is to underestimate the pleasures and social benefits of smoking.
For example, both nonsmokers and smokers overestimate the health costs of smoking, which suggests that if their estimates became more accurate, we might see more smokers, not less.
That in no way implies that it would be a good choice for people to smoke more. People don’t make those decisions through rational analysis.
Emphasis mine. I don’t think this is the question at all, because you also have the grade information; the only question is if grades screen off evidence from names, which is your second option. It seems to me that the odds that the name provides no additional information are very low.
If you combine a low noise signal with a high noise signal the combined signal can be of medium noise. Combining information isn’t always useful if you want to use both signal as proxy for the same thing.
For combining information in such a way you would have to believe that the average black with a IQ of 120 will get a higher GPA score than the average white person of the same IQ.
I think there little reason to believe that’s true.
Without actually running a factor analysis on the outcomes of hiring decision it will be very difficult to know in which direction it would correct the decision.
Even if you do run factor analysis integrating addtional variables costs you degrees of freedom so it not always a good choice to integrate as much variables as possible in your model. Simple models often outperform more complicated ones.
Human’s are also not good at combining multiple sources of information.
If you combine a low noise signal with a high noise signal the combined signal can be of medium noise. Combining information isn’t always useful if you want to use both signal as proxy for the same thing.
Agreed that if you have P(A|B) and P(A|C), then you don’t have enough to get P(A|BC).
But if you have the right objects and they’re well-calibrated, then adding in a new measurement always improves your estimate. (You might not be sure that they’re well-calibrated, in which case it might make sense to not include them, and that can obviously include trying to estimate P(A|BC) from P(A|C) and P(A|B).)
For combining information in such a way you would have to believe that the average black with a IQ of 120 will get a higher GPA score than the average white person of the same IQ.
Not quite. Regression to the mean implies that you should apply shrinkage which is as specific as possible, but this shrinkage should obviously be applied to all applicants. (Regressing black scores to the mean, and not regressing white scores, for example, is obviously epistemic malfeasance, but regressing black scores to the black mean and white scores to the white mean makes sense, even if the IQ-grades relationship is the same for blacks and whites.)
It could also be that the GPA-job performance link is different for whites and blacks, even if the IQ-GPA link is the same for whites and blacks. (And, of course, race could impact job performance directly, but it seems likely the effects should be indirect for almost all jobs.)
I think there little reason to believe that’s true.
If you’re just comparing GPAs, rather than GPAs weighted by course difficulty, there could be a systematic difference in the difficulty of classes that applicants take by race. I’ve had a hard time getting numerical data on this, for obvious reasons, but there are rumors that some institutions may have a grade bias in favor of blacks. (Obviously, you can’t fit a parameter to a rumor, but this is reason to not discount an effect that you do see in your data.)
Simple models often outperform more complicated ones.
Yes, but… motivated cognition alert. If you’re building models correctly, you take this into account by default, and so there’s no point in bringing it up for any particular input because you should already be checking it for every input.
For combining information in such a way you would have to believe that the average black with a IQ of 120 will get a higher GPA score than the average white person.
I think there little reason to believe that’s true.
Could you explain your reasoning here?
IQ is a strong predictor of academic performance, and a 1.5 sd gap is a fairly significant difference. The only thing I could think of to counterbalance it so that the average white would get a higher GPA would be through fairly severe racial biases in grading policies in their favor, which seems at odds with the legally-enforced racial biases in admissions / graduation operating in the opposite direction. Not to mention that black African immigrants, legal ones anyway, seem to be the prototype of high-IQ blacks who outperform average whites.
I am a little puzzled by the claim, which leads me to believe I’ve misunderstood you somehow or overlooked something fairly important.
Source is here. SD for Asians and Europeans is 35, SD for Africans was 85. N=20,000.
What’s wrong here? 4 degrees of accuracy for brain size and no error bars? That’s a sign of someone being either intentionally or unintentionally dishonest.
...no? Why in the world would he present error bars? The numbers are in line with other studies, without massive uncertainty, and irrelevant to his actual, stated and quoted, point.
His stated point is about telling things that everybody is supposed to know.
If you have an SD of 35 for an average of 1362 you have no idea about whether the last digit should be a 2. That means either you do state an error interval or you round to 1360.
European gained a lot of bodymass over the last 100 years due to better nutrition. The claim that it’s static at 4 digit in a way where you could use 30 year old data to describes todays situation, gives the impression that human brainsize is something with is relatively fixed.
The difference in brain size between Africans and European in brainsize in that study is roughly the difference in height between todays Europeans and Europeans 100 years ago.
Given that background taking a three decades old average from one sample population and claiming that it’s with 4 digits accuracy the average that exist today is wrong.
His stated point is about telling things that everybody is supposed to know.
No, that was absolutely not his point. I don’t understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:
Graduate students in anthropology generally don’t know those facts about average brain volume in different populations. Some of those students stumbled onto claims about such differences and emailed a physical anthropologist I know, asking if those differences really exist. He tells them ‘yep’ – I’m not sure what happens next. Most likely they keep their mouths shut. Ain’t it great, living in a free country?
More generally, that was not a tightly reasoned book/paper about brainsize. That line was a throwaway point in support of a minor example (“For example, average brain size is not the same in all human populations”) on a short blog post. Arguments about the number of significant figures presented, when you don’t even disagree about the overall example or the conclusion, are about as good an example of bad disagreement as I can imagine.
No, that was absolutely not his point. I don’t understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:
I don’t think that the following classes are the same: (1) Facts everyone should know. (2) Facts everyone knows.
I think the author claims that this is a (1) fact but not a (2) fact.
(a) Everybody knew that different ethnicities had different brain sizes
(b) It was an uncomfortable fact, so nobody talked about it
(c) Now nobody knows that different ethnicities have different brain sizes
If you have an SD of 35 for an average of 1362 you have no idea about whether the last digit should be a 2. That means either you do state an error interval or you round to 1360.
If individual datapoints have an SD of 35, and you have 20000 datapoints, then the SD of studies like this is 35/sqrt(20000)≈0.24. So giving a one’s digit for the average is perfectly reasonable.
According to the paper the total mean brain size for males is 1,427 while for females it’s 1,272. Given around half women and half men the SD per point should be higher than 35.
The article contains the line:
What’s wrong here? 4 degrees of accuracy for brain size and no error bars? That’s a sign of someone being either intentionally or unintentionally dishonest.
Quick Googling shows that there’s a paper published that states that European’s average cranial capacities is 1347.
Rather then describing the facts as they are he paints things as more certain than they are. I think that people who do that in an area, where false beliefs lead to people being descrimited, are in no position to complain when they some social scorn.
How meaningful are figures on brain size without figures on overall body size?
That’s close enough to not effect his point, or even the order. I think you’re engaging in motivated continuing to avoid having to acknowledge conclusions you find uncomfortable.
Do you also apply the same criticism to the (much larger number of) people how make (much larger errors) in the direction of no difference? Also, could you taboo what you mean by “descrimited”. Steelmanning suggests you mean “judged according to inaccurate priors”, yet you also seem be implying that inaccurately equaliterian priors aren’t a problem.
Whatever the problem with non-factually-based equality may be, it is not a problem of discrimination, so the same criticism does not apply.
This gets back to the issue that neither you nor Christian have defined what you mean by “discrimination”. I gave one definition: “judged according to inaccurate priors”, according to which your comment is false. If you want to use some other definition, please state it.
Why would you think we are not using it in the standard sense? “Discrimination is the prejudicial and/or distinguishing treatment of an individual based on their actual or perceived membership in a certain group or category”
By that reasoning, refusing to hire someone who doesn’t have good recommendations, is discrimination, because you’re giving him distinguishing treatment (refusing to hire him) based on membership in a category (people who lack good recommendations).
I think you have some assumptions that you need to make explicit, after thinking them through first. (For instance, one obvious change is to replace “category” with “irrelevant category”, but that won’t work.)
Well, the recommendations you have are to some extent the result of your choices and actions, but whether your name sounds black hardly is. So, regret-of-rationality considerations apply more to the former than to the latter.
So you are saying that I should modify the definition of “discrimination” supplied by TAG, to include a qualifier “only as a result of your choices and actions”?
That seems to say that some forms of religious discrimination don’t count (choosing not to convert to Christianity is a result of your own choices and actions). It also ignores the fact that it is possible for someone to fall into a group where some of the group’s members got there by their own choices and actions but some don’t—not every person who can’t get good recommendations is in that situation because of his own choices and actions. In fact, there’s a continuum; what if, say, 10% of the people in a category got there by their own choices and actions but the other 90% had no choice?
Yes, it’s a continuum. That’s why I said “to some extent”, “hardly”, and “more … than”.
That would still mean that if I say “convert to Christianity or I won’t hire you” and you refuse, that wouldn’t count as discrimination. It would also mean that refusing to hire gay people would not be discrimination, as long as you only refused to hire people who participated in some activity, whether having gay sex, wearing rainbow flags, having a gay wedding, etc.
So what? I’m not particularly outraged that atheists aren’t allowed into the Swiss Guards.
For some reason, this sounds more problematic to me; not sure why.
Probably because you’ve been more exposed to rhetoric saying how horrible it is to be “anti-gay” than rhetoric saying how horrible it is to be “anti-atheist”.
Actually I think it’s the other way round, at least in the last few years. (There are many more atheists than gay people in my social circles.)
Alternate hypothesis: one has a choice and the other one does not.
You realize this is circling back around, right? The issue is that the two are both defined by choices, because the second group is not gay men but men who have consensual sex with men, and the second group’s membership is voluntary regardless of whether or not the first’s is.
Eugine_Nier responded, in effect, that the most likely reason to see those restrictions as being in different classes is the “who—whom?” of religious hiring restrictions being ‘okay’ and sexual-behavior-based hiring restrictions being ‘not okay’ because of status alignments of religion and sexual behavior.
That’s a good point.
What definition of “choice” are you using that makes that statement true?
I’m not sure there’s a coherent one here. But for issues such as this, what people, or society are comfortable with is a to a large extent a function of what intuitions they have. In this sort of context, the distinction is likely connected to intuitions of free will, whether or not that makes any sense.
I don’t see any a priori reason why those intuitions should apply to the case of religion but not homosexuality.
How a priori reason do you want it to be? There’s at this point a general consensus that sexual orientation, while culturally mediated, has a large genetic component. I don’t think that anyone thinks there’s say a gene for Christianity or the like. And while self-identified sexual orientation can change, that’s substantially less common an occurrence as changes in one’s religious self-identification. For example, in the US about half of all adults have changed their religion at least once in their lives. See here. Some of those people are people changing from one version of Protestantism to another, but even when you take them out, one is still talking about around a third of the population. And this is fairly well known- people understand that religious beliefs can change: indeed, many major religions have specific rules about how to handle conversions, and many forms of major religions (especially in Christianity and Islam) have active commandments to go and convert people.
Well, atheism is correlated with IQ and (ISTM) Openness to Experience, which are both somewhere around 50% inheritable.
Look at what I found by googling for
atheism twin studies
!Yeah, well, Judaism is correlated with IQ as well :-D and I bet any non-mainstream religious beliefs will be correlated with Openness to Experience.
Well, I guess Jews and Wiccans would be as reluctant to get baptised in order to get a job as atheists are—possibly more so, insofar as I can easily imagine the latter thinking ‘if a lie is what you want, a lie is what you’ll get’ (there was a comment somewhere on LW to that effect, but I can’t find it).
Such a requirement would bother (to put it mildly) me much more as a Jew than it would as an atheist, FWIW.
Yes, on re-reading my comment it sounds like I was trying to win an award for the Understatement of the Year.
I’m not aware of any ‘consensus’ that sexual orientation has a ‘large’ genetic component. Some research suggests there is a genetic component, and it is known that there are developmental factors as well (i.e. what happens in the womb and afterwards) and also environmental factors. It is widely accepted that homosexuality is ‘not a (conscious) choice’ but that’s most definitely not the same as saying “it’s genetic”.
See other discussion in this subthread for evidence that there’s a large genetic component and that most papers in this context matter. I agree that there’s likely developmental and environmental issues at play, as well as stochastic effects.
And near as I can tell, the only things underlying this consensus are the “we can get it to show up on brain scans, therefore it must be genetic” fallacy and the accusation of being an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!!1!! hurled against anyone who questions it.
The fact that the kind of people responsible for these kinds of consensuses believe it is perfectly acceptable to promote falsehoods under the name of science for the “greater good” doesn’t exactly increase my confidence in it.
Twin studies show a strong genetic component. There’s also (weak) evidence for epigenetic effects. See here. There’s also circumstantial evidence of a link to female fertility.
The brain evidence is interesting, but it goes more to a lack of choice, rather than a genetic aspect. Of course, as with any complicated behavioral trait with some variation, it is likely that at least part of the trait is due to environmental effects at a young age, possibly including womb environment.
And you are A) Linking to a discussion where you and I already discussed exactly this and why your response didn’t make sense, and B) making a massive leap that from some political groups presenting selective evidence, that one should therefore doubt scientific studies. This does not follow.
The page you linked to doesn’t exactly present evidence of a strong genetic component (or much of a consensus for that matter).
Except it’s not evidence of lack of choice (unless you adopt a very specific kind of Cartesian dualism) either.
Your reasoning was basically “everyone lies thus some political group lying isn’t evidence against their other claims”. Not a particularly strong argument at the best of times, certainly not here were the situation is extremely analogous to the lie at the link (just substitute “transgender” for “homosexuality”).
It wasn’t just presenting selective evidence, it was getting BS or outright lies declared part of the scientific consensus.
Could you elaborate? For example, the estimate from the largest study in the page (3,826 pairs) seems pretty nontrivial: 39% of variance! That’s not small or trivial by any means—that’s getting up there with some twin estimates of intelligence. And especially since the shared-environment estimate is 0.
Of the studies in question, the only one which showed a weak correlation listed is Bearman and Brückner, which still showed a 7.7% concordance rate for male homosexuality. The female rate is lower, which shouldn’t be that surprising, given that the other studies included also showed lower concordance rates for females, and that there’s other evidence for female sexuality being more malleable than male sexuality. Moreover, the largest study in question, the Sweden study, used literally every single pair of twins born in the country, which makes for a much larger study and handles the selection bias problems. And that study agreed with the results of the other studies excepting Bearman and Bruckner.
What does this have to do with Cartesian dualism at all? For that matter, how is this at all relevant, since as I stated earlier, the matter under discussion is what is descriptively thought of as a choice or not by members of society. The entire point was discussing why someone would have a different reaction to the homosexuality discrimination issue than the atheism discrimination issue. In that context, colloquial intuitive notions of choice are relevant.
That’ isn’t what the argument is. Please reread that discussion.
Really? Did you see any evidence in that discussion that any aspect of this has had any influence on the scientific studies in question? Have they somehow managed to fake data and get it through? Do you think they’ve had papers get rejected? The only plausible sort of situation is selective granting, which requires specific aspects of the LGBTQE movement (not even generically but people who would agree with this lying idea, which the vast majority would not) to have somehow gotten positions in grant giving institutions. Do you have any evidence for that?
In isolation, this number tells us nothing. What is important is the gap between concordance rates for MZ, DZ, and siblings. There are several popular hypotheses that predict a large effect of prenatal environment. In fact, the particular paper give 7.7% MZ, 4.2% DZ, and 4.5% siblings, so it detects no effect of prenatal environment and does suggest genetics.
Unless you accept some form of Cartesian dualism you should expect every aspect of the mind to show up on sufficiently advanced brain scans, whether or not it is a choice. Thus, the brain evidence isn’t particularly interesting.
And my point is that this perception isn’t grounded in anything objective and thus itself needs an explanation.
I have, twice in the last few days in fact. Why don’t you try rereading it?
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume I misunderstood your argument there, if so could you state it more explicitly.
Well Julian practically admitted it.
Sometimes, generally pressure is applied to people who produce politically incorrect results. Look what happened to Mark Regnerus or Jason Richwine, or to use a more famous example James Watson.
Eugine, within 2 minutes of your comment above, I received a block downvote to all my recent comments regardless of subject. Given this thread, which I presume you must have already seen, my interest in whether this was your action should be clear. If you are attempting to simply ignore the issues, you may want to be aware that this is causing serious concerns and problems within the community, and at least one LW user has considered implementing a response of block downvoting all your comments and those of people with views similar to your own. This situation is creating a mindkilling political mindfield and it is in your and everyone else’s best interest for it to be headed off before the situation deteriorates. Therefore a straight answer from you as to whether you are involved in this would be both appreciated and in the best interest of the community.
If you think you can get away with ignoring ialdabaoth’s requests because of the user’s relatively low status, you should be aware that my own status on LW, while not very high, is likely not so low that simply ignoring me will be a remotely productive response.
You have made some valid points above, but I cannot given recent events discuss them or any other issue with you, until you address the community’s concerns here.
I would like to loudly add that I am very interested in the norms of polite discourse being followed on LW, and am throwing whatever status I have behind this request. Furthermore, if this turns out to be the sort of thing that is best resolved in PMs rather than comments, I am willing to facilitate conversations that way.
Attempted to reverse the effects of the block downvote. Note that any permanent solution to this problem cannot rely on the co-operation of possible defectors. If there is not a method for detecting such defections and preferably determing the source, it continues to be a viable method of asymmetric warfare.
Also might be a decent idea for someone to take formal responsibility for moderating the website. Several people have moderator powers, but I do not know of anyone who is actually responsible for such moderation. (It seems that this would fall to Eliezer by default, but this does not seem to be Eliezer’s comparative advantage.)
ETA: A designated moderator is necessary even with a system such as I described in place since the automated detection can screw up. A human overseer spending, say, an hour on this each week, may be greatly productive if thy have the appropriate tools available.
I didn’t relaise that “falsehood” meant “not necessarily true”. I also remain unclear why a statment as guarded “believed to have a genetic component” would need to be qualiied with a further “maybe”.
Let me get this straight… Are you trying to evaluate the truth of a statement by its position in a signaling game?
So would you oppose discrimination against wheelchair bound construction workers?
Oh dear. Whoever wrote the WP article I was quoting didn’t steelman their definition.
Wikipedia is supposed to use what’s in the sources. They’re not allowed to steelman.
It may just mean “group or category which I like”, but I wouldn’t count that as steelmanning.
The best I can come up with is “group or category which has, in the past, often been subject to inaccurately negative judgment based on inaccurate priors”. In fact, let’s try that one.
First sorry for the typo.
Claiming 4 degrees of accuracy means, claiming that the factor of uncertainity about the difference is off by a factor of more than ten.
Understanding the uncertainity that exist in vital for reasoning effectively about what’s true.
Different people have different goals. If your goal is the search for truth than it matters greatly whether what you speaking is true.
If your goal is to spread memes that produce social change than it makes sense to use different criteria.
What does discrimination mean? If a job application with a name that common with black people gets rejected while an identical one with a name that’s common with white people gets accepted that would be an example of bad discrimination.
Does it matter if having said name is in fact correlated with job performance?
Only if it’s still correlated when you control for anything else on the CV and cover letter, incl. the fact that the candidate is not currently employed by anyone else.
Being correlated isn’t very valuable in itself. Even if you do believe that blacks on average have a lower IQ, scores on standardized test tell you a lot more about someone IQ.
The question would be whether the name is a better predictor of job performance than grades to distinguish people in the population of people who apply or whether the information that comes from the names adds additional predictive value.
But even if various proxies of social status would perform as predictors I still value high social mobility. Policies that increase it might not be in the interest of the particular employeer but of interest to society as a whole.
Emphasis mine. I don’t think this is the question at all, because you also have the grade information; the only question is if grades screen off evidence from names, which is your second option. It seems to me that the odds that the name provides no additional information are very low.
To the best of my knowledge, no studies have been done which submit applications where the obviously black names have higher qualifications in an attempt to determine how many GPA points an obviously black name costs an applicant. (Such an experiment seems much more difficult to carry out, and doesn’t have the same media appeal.)
So, this “only question” formulation is a little awkward and I’m not really sure what it means. For my part I endorse correctly using (grades + name) as evidence, and I doubt that doing so is at all common when it comes to socially marked names… that is, I expect that most people evaluate each source of information in isolation, failing to consider to what extent they actually overlap (aka, screen one another off).
ChristianKI brought up the proposition “(name)>(grades)” where > means that the prediction accuracy is higher, but the truth or falsity of that proposition is irrelevant to whether or not it’s epistemically legitimate to include name in a decision, which is determined by “(name+grades)>(grades)”.
Doing things correctly is, in general, uncommon. But the shift implied by moving from ‘current’ to ‘correct’ is not always obvious. For example, both nonsmokers and smokers overestimate the health costs of smoking, which suggests that if their estimates became more accurate, we might see more smokers, not less. It’s possible that hiring departments are actually less biased against people with obviously black names than they should be.
...insofar as their current and future estimates of health costs are well calibrated with their actual smoking behavior, at least. Sure.
Well, it’s odd to use “bias” to describe using observations as evidence in ways that reliably allow more accurate predictions, but leaving the language aside, yes, I agree that it’s possible that hiring departments are not weighting names as much as they should be for maximum accuracy in isolation… in other words, that names are more reliable evidence than they are given credit for being.
That said, if I’m right that there is a significant overlap between the actual information provided by grades and by names, then evaluating each source of information in isolation without considering the overlap is nevertheless a significant error.
Now, it might be that the evidential weight of names is so great that the error due to not granting it enough weight overshadows the error due to double-counting, and it may be that the signs are such that double-counting leads to more accurate results than not double-couting. Here again, I agree that this is possible.
But even if that’s true, continuing to erroneously double-count in the hopes that our errors keep cancelling each other out isn’t as reliable a long-term strategy as starting to correctly use all the evidence we have.
Agreed. Any sort of decision process which uses multiple pieces of information should be calibrated on all of those pieces of information together whenever possible.
It’s even possible that if the costs of smoking are overestimated, more people should be smoking—part of the campaign against smoking is to underestimate the pleasures and social benefits of smoking.
That in no way implies that it would be a good choice for people to smoke more. People don’t make those decisions through rational analysis.
If you combine a low noise signal with a high noise signal the combined signal can be of medium noise. Combining information isn’t always useful if you want to use both signal as proxy for the same thing.
For combining information in such a way you would have to believe that the average black with a IQ of 120 will get a higher GPA score than the average white person of the same IQ.
I think there little reason to believe that’s true.
Without actually running a factor analysis on the outcomes of hiring decision it will be very difficult to know in which direction it would correct the decision.
Even if you do run factor analysis integrating addtional variables costs you degrees of freedom so it not always a good choice to integrate as much variables as possible in your model. Simple models often outperform more complicated ones.
Human’s are also not good at combining multiple sources of information.
Agreed that if you have P(A|B) and P(A|C), then you don’t have enough to get P(A|BC).
But if you have the right objects and they’re well-calibrated, then adding in a new measurement always improves your estimate. (You might not be sure that they’re well-calibrated, in which case it might make sense to not include them, and that can obviously include trying to estimate P(A|BC) from P(A|C) and P(A|B).)
Not quite. Regression to the mean implies that you should apply shrinkage which is as specific as possible, but this shrinkage should obviously be applied to all applicants. (Regressing black scores to the mean, and not regressing white scores, for example, is obviously epistemic malfeasance, but regressing black scores to the black mean and white scores to the white mean makes sense, even if the IQ-grades relationship is the same for blacks and whites.)
It could also be that the GPA-job performance link is different for whites and blacks, even if the IQ-GPA link is the same for whites and blacks. (And, of course, race could impact job performance directly, but it seems likely the effects should be indirect for almost all jobs.)
If you’re just comparing GPAs, rather than GPAs weighted by course difficulty, there could be a systematic difference in the difficulty of classes that applicants take by race. I’ve had a hard time getting numerical data on this, for obvious reasons, but there are rumors that some institutions may have a grade bias in favor of blacks. (Obviously, you can’t fit a parameter to a rumor, but this is reason to not discount an effect that you do see in your data.)
Yes, but… motivated cognition alert. If you’re building models correctly, you take this into account by default, and so there’s no point in bringing it up for any particular input because you should already be checking it for every input.
Could you explain your reasoning here?
IQ is a strong predictor of academic performance, and a 1.5 sd gap is a fairly significant difference. The only thing I could think of to counterbalance it so that the average white would get a higher GPA would be through fairly severe racial biases in grading policies in their favor, which seems at odds with the legally-enforced racial biases in admissions / graduation operating in the opposite direction. Not to mention that black African immigrants, legal ones anyway, seem to be the prototype of high-IQ blacks who outperform average whites.
I am a little puzzled by the claim, which leads me to believe I’ve misunderstood you somehow or overlooked something fairly important.
I missed the qualification of speaking of whites with the same IQ. I added it via an edit.
Right, okay. I did misunderstand you. I’ll correct my comment as soon as I figure out the strikethrough function here.
I believe the primary way to get strikethrough is to strikethrough the entire comment, by retracting it.
You can use unicode.
I’d recommend Vaniver’s solution instead—IME Android phones don’t like yours.
Source is here. SD for Asians and Europeans is 35, SD for Africans was 85. N=20,000.
...no? Why in the world would he present error bars? The numbers are in line with other studies, without massive uncertainty, and irrelevant to his actual, stated and quoted, point.
His stated point is about telling things that everybody is supposed to know.
If you have an SD of 35 for an average of 1362 you have no idea about whether the last digit should be a 2. That means either you do state an error interval or you round to 1360.
Human height changed quite a bit over the last century. http://www.voxeu.org/article/reaching-new-heights-how-have-europeans-grown-so-tall . Taking data about human brainsize with 4 digit accuracy and assuming that it hasn’t changed over the last 30 years is wrong.
European gained a lot of bodymass over the last 100 years due to better nutrition. The claim that it’s static at 4 digit in a way where you could use 30 year old data to describes todays situation, gives the impression that human brainsize is something with is relatively fixed.
The difference in brain size between Africans and European in brainsize in that study is roughly the difference in height between todays Europeans and Europeans 100 years ago.
Given that background taking a three decades old average from one sample population and claiming that it’s with 4 digits accuracy the average that exist today is wrong.
No, that was absolutely not his point. I don’t understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:
More generally, that was not a tightly reasoned book/paper about brainsize. That line was a throwaway point in support of a minor example (“For example, average brain size is not the same in all human populations”) on a short blog post. Arguments about the number of significant figures presented, when you don’t even disagree about the overall example or the conclusion, are about as good an example of bad disagreement as I can imagine.
I don’t think that the following classes are the same:
(1) Facts everyone should know.
(2) Facts everyone knows.
I think the author claims that this is a (1) fact but not a (2) fact.
His claim was:
(a) Everybody knew that different ethnicities had different brain sizes (b) It was an uncomfortable fact, so nobody talked about it (c) Now nobody knows that different ethnicities have different brain sizes
If individual datapoints have an SD of 35, and you have 20000 datapoints, then the SD of studies like this is 35/sqrt(20000)≈0.24. So giving a one’s digit for the average is perfectly reasonable.
According to the paper the total mean brain size for males is 1,427 while for females it’s 1,272. Given around half women and half men the SD per point should be higher than 35.
(Assuming the sample is unbiased.)
Well, he did say “about”.