Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Aside from the usual Magic Dirt Theory, there is also the Magic (American) Racism Theory. James Flynn explains the conundrum for environmentalists: There is no doubt that high h² [heritability] estimates force environmentalists to find a factor or factors that are relatively uniform in their presence within the black population – and within the white…
Continue ReadingI am posting this because this is not widely known, but I think this angle should be taken more seriously. I hope philosophers will read this and get inspired! Urbach, P. (1974). Progress and Degeneration in the’IQ Debate’ (I). The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 25(2), 99-135. PDF Urbach, P. (1974). Progress and…
Continue ReadingPeople keep asking me about the state of the art re. evidence for physiognomy, so here’s a brief review. Phrenology used to be considered legit, and then eventually people realized it was all bogus. Since then, it is usually brought up an example of how science goes wrong in terms of stereotyping, and references to…
Continue ReadingBen van der Merwe (covered by others here, here), the social justice activist journalist, has been working for some years now to produce various hit pieces on researchers associated with the London Conference on Intelligence (which now has a Wikipedia page thanks to him). His efforts have largely succeeded in that his pieces and the…
Continue ReadingSee also previously: Environmentalists like admixture analysis too (until they don’t) Let’s talk a little Bayesian statistics and how it applies to model selection in the race and IQ debate. A number of environmentalists have made arguments like that by Centerwall 1978: Centerwall, B. S. (1978). The use of racial admixture as evidence in intelligence…
Continue ReadingErowid has thousands of reviews of 100s of different drugs. So it should be possible to easily scrape these reports, and then use various text analysis methods on them to do things like: Clustering of drugs by similarity of experiences These should replicate the pharmacological descriptions, e.g deliriants should cluster together Ratings of overall pleasantness…
Continue ReadingEwan Birney, Jennifer Raff, Adam Rutherford, Aylwyn Scally. Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer. Ewan’s Blog: Bioinformatician at large. Additional remarks by Raff on her blog On Race, Genetics, and Pseudoscience Main thing of interest “Over the course of a year, we worked together on a statement that best reflects our consensus view of human…
Continue ReadingBeing on Twitter you quickly run into some people calling themselves scientists, but who seem to not be doing much science at all and instead spending their time on politics and self-promotion, not to mention book sales. Some years ago, some economists did some numbers on this and came up with the Kardashian Index (original…
Continue ReadingHans Eysenck. The Psychology of Politics. 1963 (first published 1954). From time to time, I like to read old books to get a sense of what people were interested in many decades ago. Often this produces surprises, where you find out that people were already talking about the same thing you are thinking about now,…
Continue ReadingRushton, J. P. (1997). Review essay. [Review of the books The Bell Curve Debate, The Bell Curve Wars, Final Solutions, The Mismeasure of Man, The Nazi Connection, The Race Gallery, and The Science and Politics of Racial Research.]. Society, 34, 78-82. While reading an obscure books review by Rushton, I came across an interesting claim:…
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