Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Dictionaries define indoctrination as: the act of indoctrinating, or teaching or inculcating a doctrine, principle, or ideology, especially one with a specific point of view (dictionary.com) the process of repeating an idea or belief to someone until they accept it without criticism or question (Cambridge) to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point…
Continue ReadingThis mistake is very common, and here we look at an arbitrary example I was sent promoted by Rob Henderson on Twitter. This error is quite common (first example I found), so this was not chosen to say Rob is particularly bad at this. The same error can often be found in discussion of The…
Continue ReadingMany countries add fluoride to the drinking water in the belief this will improve dental health. As with anything else public health, some people think this is a grave mistake. So on the positive side, it seems to help with the intended target, a good start for any social policy. Wikipedia’s summary is kinda what…
Continue ReadingOne very basic fact of humans is that ability to do anything varies. This is also true for ability to do cognitively demanding jobs of which the main requirement is general intelligence. This trait follows a well known normalish distribution in the population. In general, then, it follows that the more people society dedicates to…
Continue ReadingKirkegaard, E. O. W., & Fedorov, J. (2021). Country of Origin IQ and Muslim Percentage Predict Grade Point Average in School among 116 Immigrant Groups in Denmark. Mankind Quarterly, 61(3). Immigrants to Western countries typically have worse social outcomes than natives, but country of origin immigrant groups differ widely. We studied school performance in Denmark…
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…
Continue ReadingSpeaking of philosophy of science, one of the things about new paradigms is that they are supposed to solve anomalies of older paradigms. A while ago, Dalliard (2014) mentioned (in a footnote!) one of these, namely the attitude-achievement paradox. There’s quite a number of studies on it: The brief version is that black, Hispanic etc….
Continue ReadingPeople commonly ascribe large effects to having this or that teacher, or this or that classmate. They usually cite some anecdotes from their personal lives for this, but large sample size, systematic data are strongly negative on the idea. This means that to the extent one can measure things, teachers are largely interchangeable in terms…
Continue ReadingI apparently did not post this one on the blog, only on Twitter. Or at least, I can’t find it. Here’s the analysis: http://rpubs.com/EmilOWK/pub_bias_early_intervention Figures
Continue ReadingMay be another case of a zombie idea: one that keeps being refuted only to come back under another term, and then await refutation for 10-20 years. It is also fairly obvious: systematic approaches to more or less everything work better than ad hoc, haphazard ones. There’s no reason to expect this also not to…
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