Borsboom, D. (2006). The attack of the psychometricians. Psychometrika, 71(3), 425. This paper analyzes the theoretical, pragmatic, and substantive factors that have hampered the integration between psychology and psychometrics. Theoretical factors include the operationalist mode of thinking which is common throughout psychology, the dominance of classical test theory, and the use of “construct validity” as […]
Predictably, Stuart Ritchie doesn’t like our Ashkenazim intelligence paper (Why doesn’t he? He dislikes all group difference research. See more below.) He makes a big deal of the fact that the sample size for Wisconsin Ashkenazim was only 53. (He neglects to mention that the comparison group numbered 2000 Christians). It might seem like most […]
Dunkel, C. S., Woodley of Menie, M. A., Pallesen, J., & Kirkegaard, E. O. (2019). Polygenic scores mediate the Jewish phenotypic advantage in educational attainment and cognitive ability compared with Catholics and Lutherans. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. So predictably, our study on Jewish IQ has elicited some rather harsh (and in some cases moralistic) criticisms from […]
Previous results. 23andme has updated their ancestry estimates, so I’m reposting mine for people who are wondering. The change to previously is that now I’m slightly more European: 99.8% vs. 99.7%. I’m no longer North African, but now I’m 0.1% Amerindian (false positive probably), and less Ashkenazi 2.8% (from 2.9%). They also report regional results […]
Paul Graham‘s 2004 essay What you can’t say had a big influence on me and remains my favorite essay. In he argued essentially that popular morality shows fashion tendencies i.e. that it varies over time but for no evidence-linked reason. What is at one time considered a grievous moral evil is later considered not a […]
I tweeted about this already, but I’m dumping some notes here for future reference. The Wordsum is a 10 word vocabulary test that’s been used for decades as a brief measure of intelligence. It’s most prominently used in the General Social Survey (GSS), a recurrent US survey of various social matters that’s been going on […]
See previous post about quotes from the medical genetics and physical anthropology literature on admixture analysis and the causal interpretation. There’s quite a few older admixture studies that examined relationships between racial ancestry and intelligence. Most of these used quite crude methods such as interviewer judgement. Some used a better method, namely objectively measured skin […]
A common comment on bias in scientific peer review is that reviewers don’t usually say openly they are applying double standards. Instead, they just silently increase their standards. If their bias against some finding is strong, the evidential burden to meet goes to infinity, making sure that nothing is rigorous enough to pass review. A […]
Sometimes references are made to such findings. For instance, in Is There Anything Good About Men? (Roy F. Baumeister, 2007): Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about […]
There’s a certain type of person that doesn’t produce any empirical contribution to “Reducing the heredity-environment uncertainty”. Instead, they contribute various theoretical arguments which they take to undermine the empirical data others give. Usually, these people have a background in philosophy or some other theoretical field. A recent example of this pattern is seen on […]