Emil Ole William Kirkegaard
Polymath scientist, maybe
I am a 26 year old polymath wannabe(?), see very long list of interests below. I am mostly self-taught in various subjects and currently a master's student in linguistics at Aarhus University, Denmark (my bachelor thesis concerned spelling reform with a focus on a proposal for Danish I developed). Basically, I do it mostly for the money (the Danish state will pay you to study AND education is free) and spend my free time studying whatever interests me.
I write lots of stuff on my English language blog, although I also have a Danish one and even an inactive Esperanto one. My more formal academic publications can be found further down this page but lots of more original data analyses can be found on my blogs.
Along with Davide Piffer I started an open science publisher, OpenPsych, which offers free to publish, open peer review, open access, open data etc. The journals mostly publish stuff related to individual and group differences in cognitive ability, personality and the associated socioeconomic outcomes.
I have yet to find any major political ism that is in line with my beliefs, but Scott Alexander's essay against libertarianism comes pretty close. Briefly put, the main political ideologies were invented before we had much of a clue how the world worked and so it would be a miracle if any one of them got it just right. I favor scientific rationalism and apply the same approach to politics. My meta-politics stance is consequentialism. I favor whatever has the best outcomes no matter which ideology it is in line with. I have been active in the Danish Pirate Party in relation to internet freedoms, civil liberties (real ones, not those pushed by social justice warriors) and harmful intellectual monopolies.
I can be found many places, but am especially active on Twitter with science related things. I can also be found on Goodreads, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, GitHub, Open Science Framework, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, LastFM, and probably some other places.
You can contact me (my first name)@emilkirkegaard.(Danish TLD) or on Tox with this ID. If you don't know which client to use, try qTox. If you really want to send me something sensitive, here's my public GPG key.
My interests are very broad, but for the moment I am mainly focused on psychology, sociology, statistics and programming. A non-exhaustive list of areas of interest can be seen below. I have ranked them roughly by current interest level.
Due to my diverse interests I have many on-going projects in various stages of completion and seriousness. The list below mentions some of the larger ones.
An open access, free-to-publish, data-sharing, open peer review metajournal right now focusing on differential psychology and behavioral genetics but we will expand.
An on-going research project into the general factor of socioeconomic inequality at various levels of analysis: countries and various administrative divisions within countries, immigrants classified by country of origin, persons classified by first or last names, and so on. The most pressing concern is writing a review article summarizing the many studies I have carried out so far.
An on-going research project in collaboration with John Fuerst into the psychological traits of immigrants and socioeconomic outcomes in relationship to their countries of origin. So far research strongly confirms that immigrant performance is predicted by country of origin variables. The most pressing concern is writing a review article of the already large body of research.
An on-going series of interactive visualizations made with Shiny that explain and illustrate statistical concepts.
OKCupid contains thousands of user-generated questions used for matching persons. Since these answers are public they can be gathered automatically. Since late 2014 we have been scraping the data form OKCupid and currently have a database of some 70,000 unique users and their answers to approximately 2000 questions as well as demographic information. Currently unpublished.
A website arguing the benefits of spelling reform with a focus on Danish (in Danish).
A website arguing the benefits of legalization of psychoactive drugs (in Danish).
Since there are high costs in time, and sometimes money as well, associated with publishing in pre-publication review journals and in many cases a relatively small benefit aside from reputational gain, I often publish in outlets with no prior review.
The list below contains my more formal publications and is sortable in various ways. To be notified in case of new publications, follow me on ResearchGate or Google Scholar.
| Title | Author(s) | Type | Outlet | Pre-publication review | Date | Sole author | First author | Last author |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lyddansk | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Book | None | 0 | 2010-10-01 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Omtale af ekstremisme i danske medier i årene 2003-2013: En kvatitativ analyse | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | None | 0 | 2013-10-26 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Predicting Immigrant IQ from their Countries of Origin, and Lynn's National IQs: A Case Study from Denmark | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Mankind Quarterly | 1 | 2013-12-31 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Criminality and fertility among Danish immigrant populations | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2014-03-24 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Criminality among Norwegian immigrant populations | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2014-04-04 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Do National IQs Predict U.S. Immigrant Cognitive Ability and Outcomes? An Analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshman | John Fuerst and Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2014-04-12 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| The genetic correlation between educational attainment, intracranial volume and IQ is due to recent polygenic selection on general cognitive ability | Davide Piffer and Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Open Behavioral Genetics | 1 | 2014-04-12 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Semantic discussions of intelligence and the (un)importance of the study of race and g: A comment on Hunt and Jaeggi (2013) | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Commentary | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2014-04-17 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Educational attainment, income, use of social benefits, crime rate and the general socioeconomic factor among 71 immigrant groups in Denmark. | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, John Fuerst | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2014-05-12 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Are Headstart gains on the g factor?: A meta-analysis | Jan te Nijenhuis, Birthe Jongeneel-Grimen and Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Intelligence | 1 | 2014-07-01 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| The international general socioeconomic factor: Factor analyzing international rankings | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2014-09-08 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Crime, income, educational attainment and employment among immigrant groups in Norway and Finland | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2014-10-09 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| The personal Jensen coefficient does not predict grades beyond its association with g | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2014-10-30 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Increasing inequality in general intelligence and socioeconomic status as a result of immigration in Denmark 1980-2014 | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, Bo Tranberg | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2015-03-04 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| S and G in Italian regions: Re-analysis of Lynn's data and new data | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-03-05 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Examining the S factor in US states | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-03-11 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| The S factor in China | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-03-05 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Indian states: G and S factors | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-03-18 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Strong negative relationship between population-level general intelligence and ADHD genetic factors inferred from allele frequencies | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-03-11 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| International differences in intelligence can be confusing: A commentary on Harrison et al (2015) | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-03-18 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Spearman's hypothesis on item-level data from Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices: A replication and extension | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-03-23 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| The S factor in the British Isles: A reanalysis of Lynn (1979) | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-03-28 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Automatic testing of all possible multiple regression models given a set of predictors | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-03-12 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Opinions about nuclear energy and global warming, and wordsum intelligence | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-03-15 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Examining the S factor in Mexican states | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-04-19 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Finding mixed cases in exploratory factor analysis | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-04-29 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| The S factor in Brazilian states | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-04-30 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Admixture in the Americas: Can racial ancestry predict cognitive ability and socioeconomic outcomes? | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, John Fuerst | Conference presentation | London Conference of Intelligence 2015 | 0 | 2015-05-09 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Immigration in Denmark and Norway | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Conference presentation | London Conference of Intelligence 2014 | 0 | 2014-04-26 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| An S factor among census tracts of Boston | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-05-29 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Why do persons from higher mean IQ populations do better even after selection? | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Commentary | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-05-12 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| What is a good name? The S factor in Denmark at the name-level | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, Bo Tranberg | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-06-03 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Immigrant GPA in Danish primary school is predictable from country-level variables | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2015-06-04 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| A replication of the S factor among US states | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-06-25 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| IQ and socioeconomic development across Regions of the UK: a reanalysis | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-06-26 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Validating a Danish translation of the International Cognitive Ability Resource sample test and Cognitive Reflection Test in a student sample | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard Oliver Nordbjerg | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2015-07-31 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Polygenic scores, genetic engineering, validity of GWAS results across major racial groups and the Piffer method | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Commentary | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-09-30 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Crime among Dutch immigrant groups is predictable from country-level variables | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | Open Differential Psychology | 1 | 2015-10-03 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Some methods for measuring and correcting for spatial autocorrelation | Emil O. W. Kirkegaard | Research paper | The Winnower | 0 | 2015-10-20 | 1 | 0 | 0 |