Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
A fellow emailed me asking for help on what to start reading to learn psychology and stats. The replication crisis means that most older psychology introductions should be viewed with distrust, and the various new streams in stats means that much of the stuff in stats textbooks, while not wrong, is less than optimal. In…
Continue ReadingA while ago, I had an idea for a direct estimate of the between group heritability from polygenic scores. The idea is based on the old DeFries (1972) paper, which had the following equation: where h2B is the between group heritability, h2W is the within group heritability, t is the intraclass phenotypic correlation, and r…
Continue ReadingSome years ago, I discovered the Swiss dataset used in R. It has data from the late 1800s of Swiss subnational units, 47 French speaking ‘provinces’ i.e. sub-canton level (probably districts). One can find the documentation here. What caught my eye was that they had test data from the army examinations going back to 1870s,…
Continue ReadingOne prominent model for why (some) nonwhite race groups do worse is that they experience hostile experience based on skin color. For instance, Hunter (2007) writes: How does colorism operate? Systems of racial discrimination operate on at least two levels: race and color. The first system of discrimination is the level of racial category, (i.e….
Continue ReadingGenetic variation between populations/races of a species is a nice single summary statistic about how large between population phenotypic differences to expect. In case of humans, this value (Fst, the fixation index) is about 15%. This finding is due to Lewontin (1972) and is now mindlessly repeated (Lewontin’s fallacy) as some kind of slam dunk…
Continue ReadingThou should in fact basically copy his work, and then publish it in The Lancet, and then not cite him, or Heiner Rindermann, or David Becker, or Gerhard Meisenberg — in fact, best not to cite any wrong-thinker at all. This seems to be what happened actually (initial tweet). Lim, S. S., Updike, R. L.,…
Continue ReadingTetlock, P. E., Kristel, O. V., Elson, S. B., Green, M. C., & Lerner, J. S. (2000). The psychology of the unthinkable: taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 78(5), 853. This old article is a serious gem, and very relevant the troubles of our time. The introduction…
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