Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Some time ago, I was building a large reference FAQ for use on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, some activist admins came along and deleted it. The archived version is here. The background for this is that I commented on a discussion about user MjolnirPants/MPants at work, who has a very long history of breaking rules and getting…
Continue ReadingPearl, J., & Mackenzie, D. (2018). The book of why: the new science of cause and effect. Basic Books. This is an interesting but annoying book. The basic pattern of the book goes like this: Scientists used to totally not know anything proper about how to do X or think about X. But no worries,…
Continue ReadingSee also previous posts: Race gaps in brain size in the very young, Of cats and dogs and men Sometimes it’s said that race science is stuck in an old time when talking about brain variables. It’s true, almost all the studies are about crude global measures: total brain volume, brain weight (autopsies) etc. The…
Continue ReadingLasker, J., Pesta, B. J., Fuerst, J. G., & Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2019). Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability. Psych, 1(1), 431-459. Using data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we examined whether European ancestry predicted cognitive ability over and above both parental socioeconomic status (SES) and measures of eye, hair, and skin color. First, using…
Continue ReadingI came across this obscure study while doing some research on other matters. Yan, H., Lavoie, A., & Das, S. (2017). The Perils of Classifying Political Orientation From Text. Linked Democracy: Artificial Intelligence for Democratic Innovation, 858, 8. Political communication often takes complex linguistic forms. Understanding political ideology from text is an important methodological task…
Continue ReadingKirkegaard, E. O. W. (2019). Solid numbers, missed opportunities: Review of The intelligence of nations. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000181 ResearchGate I was asked to review this new book written by David Becker and Richard Lynn. It’s the long work in progress that James Thompson has blogged about on numerous occasions. This book presents the latest…
Continue ReadingBack in January, we published a paper showing that the obvious explanation of variation is in GRE scores by nationality/origin fits the data well. Pesta, B. J., Fuerst, J., Kirkegaard, E. O., & Papaleo, B. (2019). Does intelligence explain national score variance on graduate admissions exams?. Intelligence, 73, 8-15. Mean scores on English-based graduate admissions…
Continue ReadingAs others have pointed out many times (recently Richwine 2019), one cannot just use identical thresholds of educational attainment to select for identical levels of human capital (broadly conceptualized) among sending immigrant countries. Example of this was that Heiner Rindermann mentioned in an interview (in German) that: Selbst in einer Elitegruppe, Ingenieurstudenten aus den Golfstaaten,…
Continue ReadingMassive sibling study just dropped, and was also presented at ISIR 2019. Hegelund, E. R., Flensborg-Madsen, T., Dammeyer, J., Mortensen, L. H., & Mortensen, E. L. (2019). The influence of familial factors on the association between IQ and educational and occupational achievement: A sibling approach. Personality and Individual Differences, 149, 100-107. The present register-based study…
Continue ReadingMachine learning psychometrics: Improved cognitive ability validity from supervised training on item level data Andrew Cutler gave the talk since I was unable to attend. Slides are here: docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xxfYTWP2R0ZFvbI24sR1jVyFC_qN_Lw85782zE5Q2Jo/edit#slide=id.p Live tweeted by Russell Warne: Last speaker of the day is Andrew Cutler (Boston U.). He's talking about "Machine Learning Psychometrics."#ISIR2019 #psychometrics #psychology — Russell T….
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