How does one correct for measurement error in sibling models?
There was a lot of discussion regarding the corrections for measurement error used in the recent Herasight intelligence polygenic score paper. I covered it for Aporia. I want to dive…
How to norm a score
Suppose you have created a new scale of something ("Science Blog Rating Scale"). It can be psychology or some other soft science, but it doesn't have to be. Suppose you…
On having negative knowledge
I'm reading Jason Brennan's 2016 book Against Democracy, actually in favor of votes weighted by competence, which he calls epistocracy. In discussing the very low levels of political knowledge seen…
What makes a good computer game? An analysis of Steam ratings
What makes a better computer game? While we can discuss game design (e.g. I studied skill vs. randomness before), we can also take an empirical approach. What we need is…
Bayesian hereditarianism
In august 2023, Sean Last wrote an important post that didn't receive enough attention. His point was that model comparisons are not correctly (Bayesically) applied in the hereditarianism vs. egalitarianism…
Mount Everest is not cold (controlling for altitude and latitude)
Most researchers don't seem to think carefully about what they put in their regression models as statistical controls. By controlling for a variable, you attempt to hold that variable at…
Herding, polls of polls and Bayes’ theorem
You have probably heard of that outlier Iowa poll that gave a surprisingly large advantage to Harris in the 2024 election. Related to this is that is what forecasters call…
When do simple methods outperform regression?
This is a nerdy post of little interest to the layman. There's this old paper that sometimes comes up: Dana, J., & Dawes, R. M. (2004). The superiority of simple…
So you want a shorter test
There are 1000s of tests, scales, and assessments that have been made in the social sciences and in life in general. Sometimes, these are far too long. Take, for instance,…
The OECD fallacy
I tweeted this funny (?) rebuke at Richard Hanania earlier: However, Twitter demanded that I explain my words: Alas, the fact is that: But to be more serious. The fact…
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