Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
See prior post on national IQs and who you can’t cite. Economists and intelligence researchers don’t generally talk: Test scores, on the other hand, offer direct measures of a variety of more-or-less specific abilities and, when the tests in question are well-constructed, objective, standardized tests, they are fairly precise measures that can be kept quite…
Continue ReadingSee prior post on self vs. other measurements of personality for a similar take. Height is the favorite trait in ‘behavioral’ genetics: it’s easy, fast and cheap to measure, continuous as opposed to dichotomous or discrete, highly polygenic, highly heritable, and no one complains to the PC police about it. So we have tons of…
Continue ReadingSome readers might remember back in 2007, it was widely reported that Chad James Watson has African ancestry: New York Times: DNA Pioneer’s Genome Blurs Race Lines A new analysis of Dr. Watson’s genome shows that he has 16 times the number of genes considered to be of African origin than the average white European…
Continue ReadingThis was a live show with real viewer questions and our attempts to answer them. Read: wild speculation, and suggestions for research. Since Youtube loves censorship these days, here’s the Bitchute archived version:
Continue ReadingNeuroscience enjoys a good public perception of scientific rigor. Unfortunately, it’s undeserved. Statistically speaking, a scientific field cannot be rigorous when it is underpowered and has a high researcher degree of freedom. This combo is exactly what neuroscience has, so we get stuff like: Button, K. S., Ioannidis, J. P., Mokrysz, C., Nosek, B. A.,…
Continue ReadingDer er is a famous meta-analysis showing that motivation affects IQ scores to a substantial degree: Duckworth, A. L., Quinn, P. D., Lynam, D. R., Loeber, R., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (2011). Role of test motivation in intelligence testing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(19), 7716-7720. Intelligence tests are widely assumed to measure maximal…
Continue ReadingSee also this post by greyenlightenment. There is a widespread (e.g. 1, 2, 3) but false belief that the 1970s supreme court case Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971) resulted in a de facto ban on using IQ (intelligence) or other cognitive testing in employment relations. This is not the case. Here’s…
Continue ReadingA lot of national intelligence criticism focuses on the measurement validity. Are the scores really comparable across countries? Most of the criticism is armchair stuff, or vaguer claims based on smaller studies such as this one: Multiple examples from different societies demonstrating that https://t.co/drJKXid5W0 — Will (@Evolving_Moloch) August 21, 2020 However, there are proper statistical…
Continue ReadingSome people think that human differences are just a matter of throwing enough money at the problem. Naturally, then, they always advocate for more educational spending whenever inconvenient gaps are such, such as those between kids of rich and poor kids: Hanushek, E. A., Peterson, P. E., Talpey, L. M., & Woessmann, L. (2020). Long-Run…
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