Recently, I took a poke at Eric Turkheimer. And now he’s ready with a retaliation: Only @KirkegaardEmil would proudly advertise support for the author of "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power" and "Swindlers of the Crematoria" as a list of "who's cool in behavioral genetics and IQ." He that lieth down with […]
I have written a lot about ancestry approaches, generally from a psychometric and genomic angle. However, economists can also play this game. Daniel A. F. Lopes, Geraldo A. Silva Filho, and Leonardo Monasterio. Culture, Institutions and School Achievement in Brazil This paper estimates the impact of culture on the academic performance of Brazilian students in […]
Eric Turkheimer is by many counts a good scientist. He has about 11.6k citations on Google Scholar, 6.3 since 2013 (i.e. last 5 years). He is prominent enough that he has a Wikipedia page, is a full professor at a University of Virginia (world rank ~150), and has published about 126 articles (according to his […]
Few people actually read this, which is a shame because the science is interesting for historical purposes, and the fulltext of his famous fallacy is rarely read. I believe this is a pity because it is really obvious when you actually read it. Lewontin, R. C. (1972). “The Apportionment of Human Diversity”. Evolutionary Biology. pp. […]
This page on Wikipedia claims rather surprisingly that: This list comprises laureates of the Nobel Prize who self-identified as atheist, agnostic, freethinker or otherwise nonreligious at some point in their lives.[2] Many of these laureates were identified with a religion earlier in life. By one estimate, between 1901-2000 about 10.5% of all laureates, and 35% […]
Just a minor stats point for an otherwise excellent paper. Woodley of Menie, M. A. & Fernandes, H. B., & Hopkins, W. D. (2015). The more g-loaded, the more heritable, evolvable, and phenotypically variable: Homology with humans in chimpanzee cognitive abilities. Intelligence, 50, 159-163. They use unit weighted factor analysis, which sounds fancy, but it […]
This year (2018) Robert Sternberg is slated to give a distinguished contributor interview at the ISIR meeting to be held in Edinburgh. There’s already tons of material on his behavior: Extreme self-citations: replicationindex.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/robert-sternbergs-rise-to-fame/ Extreme text recycling (self-plagiarism): steamtraen.blogspot.fr/2018/04/some-instances-of-apparent-duplicate.html Editorial role abuse: www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/30/prominent-psychologist-resigns-journal-editor-over-allegations-over-self-citation and more However, here I want to point out an additional angle. Sternberg […]
Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive capitalism: human capital and the wellbeing of nations. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: University Printing House. Heiner was kind enough to send me a reviewer’s (paper) copy. Unfortunately, I lack the time to write up a formal book review, and so this blogpost will have to do. James Thompson already […]
Schneider, C. (2015). The censor’s hand: the misregulation of human-subject research. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Medical and social progress depend on research with human subjects. When that research is done in institutions getting federal money, it is regulated (often minutely) by federally required and supervised bureaucracies called “institutional review boards” (IRBs). Do–can–these IRBs do […]
In the interest of keeping the scientific enterprise towards finding truth, it is important to reduce the impact of problematic studies in the scientific literature. Studies can be problematic in many ways (e.g. lacks a control for genetic confounding in social science), but one relatively simple problem to automatically identify is low precision due to […]