Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
So why trust science? I would say I am a proud supporter of scientism, crude versions aside. Naomi Oreskes is a prominent science historian who mostly writes history books attacking climate skepticism and Big Capitalism. But now she has a new brief book defending science. Actually, some of the main content is about attacking how…
Continue ReadingIn Making sense of Heritability (2005), Sesardić wrote: On the less obvious side, a nasty campaign against H could have the unintended effect of strengthening H [hereditarianism] epistemically, and making the criticism of H look less convincing. Simply, if you happen to believe that H is true and if you also know that opponents of…
Continue ReadingEysenck, H. J. (1995). Genius: The natural history of creativity (Vol. 12). Cambridge University Press. The book is on LibGen I continue my Eysenck readings with his popular genius book (prior review The Psychology of Politics (1954)). Having previously read some of Simonton’s work, Eysenck sure is a very different beast! The writing style follows…
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 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 ReadingKathryn Paige Harden is professor of psychology who belongs to the Turkheimerian ‘left psychometrics’ school. I’ve discussed the odd behavior of Eric Turkheimer before, but since then I found a rather amazing essay: The Search for a Psychometric Left 1997 (the journal seems to no longer exist). It’s definitely worth reading in its entirely, but…
Continue ReadingThere’s a certain type of person that doesn’t produce any empirical contribution to “Reducing the heredity-environment uncertainty”. Instead, they contribute various theoretical arguments which they take to undermine the empirical data others give. Usually, these people have a background in philosophy or some other theoretical field. A recent example of this pattern is seen on…
Continue ReadingI wish to coin a fallacy I’ve seen a number of times, exemplified in this paper: Kempthorne, O. (1978). A BIOMETRICS INVITED PAPER: Logical, epistemological and statistical aspects of nature-nurture data interpretation. Biometrics, 1-23. Abstract: In this paper the nature of the reasoning processes applied to the nature-nurture question is discussed in general and with…
Continue ReadingThis text used to be hosted at Shalizi‘s university website, but it was recently taken down for unknown reasons. However, Internet Archive saves us, and I repost it here because it’s interesting and so it doesn’t get lost. This text has circulated quite a number of times on Usenet, and so far as I know…
Continue ReadingAfter reading a book defending limitations to free trade/protectionism, it was time for something completely different. So I looked around after any current, well-regarded (in their circles) Austrian libertarian economist. Because I know many ancap people, I just picked one of those they often mentioned: Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Looking over his Wikipedia profile, you’d probably get the general…
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