she was focusing on the wrong aspects of the graph. Graphs are data, not works of art.
That's preposterous. Graphs are often works of art--just look at any math book catalog, they're filled with pretty graphs meant primarily to catch the eye. Fractal art is another example I'm personally familiar with. Sure I might be graphing a representation of growth rates of iterated complex functions over variable start positions, but I don't particularly care when creating a nice fractal image.
Your implication that she doesn't have the mental capacity to fully understand a linear graph and simultaneously have aesthetic concerns about it is stupid and perhaps sexist. Your entire remark is just idiotic; perhaps you're trolling.
Anecdotal evidence isn't even suggestive. It's just raw uncontrolled data points. You cannot draw inferences from it.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong on this point. Anecdotal evidence is generally agreed to be suggestive. You cited Wikipedia in your other reply, so I will too:
Anecdotal evidence is considered dubious support of a claim; it is accepted only in lieu of more solid evidence.
* cannot prove anything in themselves but sometimes provide leads for useful research * tend to support a conclusion of discrimination * can be useful to generate hypotheses * Often construed to prove nothing, because life would be much easier if it did (see wishful thinking). [I must say this is an odd definition] * Anecdotal evidence is unreliable evidence * evidence that has not been confirmed by controlled scientific methods
It can suggest the truth, but it is certainly unreliable. It can support inferences such as, "maybe X occurs with Y". It cannot support inferences such as "X occurs with Y" (though my citation did that duty in my original post; I only offered anecdotal evidence because my main evidence was behind a paywall).
Aggregating anecdotal data is NOT what studies do because such data is never controlled.
Actually, you are partly right. It seems most of the definitions of anecdotal evidence explicitly disallow data taken from controlled experiments, though some are more general and do not include this requirement. I was working with the more general definition. For instance, I would call a single individual's survey results taken in isolation anecdotal evidence even if they came from a controlled study. In that sense my statements were true.
Again, as a math major you should realize this.
That is a mildly annoying rhetorical device. You were incorrect (such data is sometimes controlled, depending on who you ask, and I'm not the only one), but even if you were correct, one should only expect an applied math major to necessarily have knowledge in this area. My major was essentially pure.
I didn't debate the truth of your statement on homosexual male brains, just its relevance. Again, I was discussing only the most intelligent people. Most of the citations on the Wikipedia article are irrelevant here, though I did take the time to glance through this one. The subjects were not differentiated based on intelligence and were indeed taken from the general population in that respect, as I suggested. There was no attempt at figuring out what fraction of each population was highly intelligent, for instance (and the sample sizes were miniscule anyway; the studies my citation relied on had tens of thousands of participants).
As for others providing criticism of my citation, actually only one person provided any sort of criticism of it, and they admitted not being able to read it. I was actually hoping for an informed social scientist's opinion on the article, especially considering I wasn't able to find similar results (though it is quite new).
I cited Plato because he came from a vastly different environment than my other example, which was a B-movie from 12 years ago. Your criticism of Plato's relevance (as seems to be your pattern) is shallow. Certainly he got lots wrong, and many of his ideas were by today's standards just stupid, but that doesn't invalidate everything he said.
At the risk of repeating past mistakes, I am objectively very intelligent as measured on various tests and as supported by lots of anecdotal evidence. It's a statement of fact, nothing more; I'm not implying I can't make mistakes or am smarter than everyone else or something silly like that. I'm just saying I would fall in the highest intelligence category in the studies analyzed by the paper I linked.
I called science "gay" only as hyperbole, which several people found to be funny, as it was intended. I made my meaning clear shortly thereafter. Your semantic quibble is probably just because you don't like me and/or disagree with me on other issues.
I'm aware of Ioannidis's paper. He focused on biomedical research (though generalized his results) and repeatedly decried small sample sizes, large numbers of tests, and bias. The paper I linked uses three large data sets from two countries and does not appear to have been fishing for statistical significance by testing many things. I am unable to comment on bias in this case.
That you say "there is absolutely no reason to trust" the paper without reading it is remarkable. (I also find it strange that you don't have journal access after so long in research, but oh well.) As near as I can tell, you concluded solely based on your personal anecdotal evidence that the paper couldn't possibly be correct, justified that belief with an appeal to general inaccuracies in social science research, and then finally after some prodding actually looked into the paper and its author. From there you found a highly critical blog post about another blog post. My link was published. That's not to say Kanazawa is a particularly great source, just that your criticism is imperfect.
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine you were very good in your field with such superficial analyses. Maybe you used to take more care. I would like to mention that I'm not actually certain about my conclusion either (note my criticism of my own argument). I haven't found Kanazawa's results replicated elsewhere, though they are quite new, and my personal anecdotes are merely suggestive. In retrospect I should have been clearer about this originally; I fell prey to the desire to express very strong opinions (as you may have) simply to be heard online.
it's impossible for two rational agents to disagree over a matter of fact.
Not really. Constructivism in math is a broad name for a variety of beliefs about what types of proofs are valid. A classic example (my wording):
Theorem: There exist irrational positive numbers a and b such that a^b is nonetheless rational.
Proof: sqrt(2) is irrational, which has a proof basically everyone accepts. [Suppose sqrt(2) were rational, write the fraction in lowest terms, square both sides, deduce the numerator and denominator are both even, a contradiction, so sqrt(2) is not rational == irrational.]
sqrt(2)^sqrt(2) is either rational or irrational. If rational: a=sqrt(2) and b=sqrt(2) works. If irrational: a=sqrt(2)^sqrt(2) and b=sqrt(2) results in a^b = sqrt(2)^(sqrt(2)*sqrt(2)) = sqrt(2)^2 = 2, which is rational, so these work.
The proof above merely says that, of two candidates for a^b, at least one of them must satisfy all conditions. It does not tell us which candidate is correct, so the proof is rejected by constructivists. In such a case one hopes that each person can accept the other's argument subject to some assumptions they do not actually accept. This is the difference between accepting the truth of (A implies B) and accepting the truth of (A and (A implies B)).
[It happens that sqrt(2)^sqrt(2) is transcendental, so irrational, thanks to the Gelfand-Schneider theorem, which is itself objectively awesome, and that's a fact.]
I'm sorry, but I think you should grow a little thicker skin. There's another interpretation to this joke: the arts girl knew exactly what she was doing, liked a less steep line better aesthetically, and was confused by the engineers' lack of artistic concern. The professor knew precisely what was happening (being an art person himself) which is why he didn't crack a smile. There, dumb art girl joke turned into dumb smug engineer joke.
On the other end, my brother and ex-girlfriend were each psych majors in college and had to go through stats. Both failed it the first time (different schools, both had very large failure fractions in those classes). My brother in particular hated the course, though the second time he got a B without having the foggiest idea of what standard deviation means--I'm pretty sure they just used a massive curve because too many people were failing. Both of them embody math phobia. My ex eventually learned something of stats, my brother never did (and he's not using his degree either).
That said, I'd suggest stats needs to be directly useful to these people. My brother in particular complained about his difficult-to-understand professor who just wrote lots of formulas on the board all class period; he dutifully copied them down and did some mystical sort of pattern matching on tests (that I think were multiple choice). If I were asked to teach such a course, I'd try designing an overarching motivating example, where you make up an experiment, collect some data, and ask the pertinent questions for analyzing it, eg. "how confident can we be that this survey accurately reflects everyone's opinion?" Keep all the abstraction as far away as possible, keep motivating examples that are directly relevant to their studies close at hand, and test them on their ability to critically analyze papers and experimental data instead of their ability to solve stats problems. My 2c at least.
The best biologically beneficial explanation I've heard for homosexual animal behavior is that it reduces aggression when you have a surplus of males in a group. Exclusive homosexuality is very rare (nonexistent?) in animals besides humans though, so animal and human homosexuality aren't particularly comparable, even ignoring the huge intellectual, emotional, and "romantic"/mating style differences. As an exclusively homosexual human, I do once in a while wonder what the difference is that makes exclusive homosexuality nonexistent among say bonobos but existent in me. Maybe there is a further biological benefit?
My bet is actually on "biological accident". Humans got complicated mentally and sometimes some female wiring makes it into male brains and vice versa. Oh well.
By "smart people tend to be gay", I meant (and made clear two sentences later) that smart people tend to be gay more often than people in general tend to be gay, not something ridiculous like a majority of smart people are gay.
Your reasoning is quite poor in several places, which makes me disinclined to believe you over the published study I linked. Specifically...
* Your anecdotal evidence disagrees with the paper, so the paper that studied tens of thousands of people in two countries must be wrong.
* You say gay people "aren't 'special' in any way" yet your anecdotal evidence supports the opposite conclusion--that gay people are less likely that you would expect to be "very intelligent", considering you know none when you'd expect to know 1-2.
* You seem to believe in the utter equality of straight and gay people. This is of course inconsistent with you being "allergic to bias"--let the data speak for itself.
* Gay is popular recently, which should motivate gay people to make spurious "gay people are smart people" research. Wouldn't a lack of popularity motivate that, and a surplus of popularity make it unnecessary?
* Gay researchers/scientists are extremely susceptible to bias when studying gay issues. Change "gay" to "female" to see how silly this is; it would be preposterous to make female judges recuse themselves on abortion cases, for instance. The paper I cited discusses motivations briefly (I have no real idea if the researcher is gay; I suspect not):
However, I emphasize that my findings have absolutely no practical importance. It is not like we can now use someone’s intelligence to assess their homosexuality accurately. My approach to science is decidedly basic, not applied (clinical or medical). I am entirely driven by the desire to discover knowledge, not by its potential applications or implications
There is another paper (cited by this one; I can dig out the citation if you want...) where in the general population gay men's verbal scores beat straight men's, though lesbian's scores were lower than straight women's. What kind of crazy bias causes that?
* I personally am incapable of avoiding bias here since I "cherish" the idea that highly intelligent people are gay more often than people in general. I admit I find this idea appealing, but the truth is the truth. I don't shy away from nasty statistics, like this one: 19% of American men who have sex with men have HIV/AIDS. I don't claim to understand *why* the intelligence correlation exists, just that it does. I also made no judgement on whether the effect was good or bad; I just said that "science is gay" in this specific sense.
I also wanted to mention that I very much question your anecdotal evidence. If you know 20-30 "very intelligent" guys, you would presumably know well over 100 people, and you would expect something like 5 gay people in such a sample if it's at all representative, yet you "don't know any gay people". It's pretty easy to pass as straight, especially in a workplace context where it simply doesn't have to come up.
The studies were conducted in the US and the UK. Your alternative explanation is of course discussed in the paper:
Another possibility is that more intelligent individuals, rather than being truly more homosexual in their sexual identity, expressed attraction, and sexual behaviour, are more likely openly to admit that they are homosexual than less intelligent individuals. [...] There is no way for me to discover whether respondents may be misrepresenting themselves in my data; just like any other user of these survey data, I am at the mercy of their recorded responses. However, if more intelligent individuals are indeed more likely openly to admit that they are homosexual, then one would think that more educated individuals are equally more likely to be so candid. This alternative hypothesis therefore cannot explain why education has a significantly negative association with homosexuality in Studies 1 and 3 and no association at all in Study 2.
The best criticism of my argument I can think of is the link between intelligent homosexuals and scientists. I offered no evidence whatsoever to support the idea that smart gay people are approximately as likely as straight people to become scientists, and my main source says that homosexuality and education are sometimes negatively correlated. It goes on to say,
...why are education and homosexuality negatively associated? [...] One possibility is that the stress and stigma associated with being gay and coming out make it more difficult for gay children and adolescents to pursue higher education.
This offers a possible explanation for our differing anecdotes. Perhaps the stress and stigma above has gotten better in recent years, so the education/homosexuality correlation is time-dependent. I note that Studies 1 and 3 used older data/people than Study 2. Or perhaps not; this is social science after all, and there are always more hypotheses to test.
Now that the substance of my response is out of the way, I wanted to mention that I find your post annoying and essentially hypocritical. You call the research I cited "probably as flawed as it can be", a remarkably strong statement. To justify it you offered only an obvious criticism the paper discussed (certainly you didn't even glance at the conclusion section) and anecdotal evidence. You also offered no substantive criticism of my movie and Plato references, though of course they carry much, much less weight than the study anyway.
Talking down to me was also not helpful. Perhaps I shouldn't have called myself "very intelligent". I suspect it made several people including you want to lash out. I was hoping it could be taken as the statement of fact that it is, but that is probably too much to ask for on the internet.
the articles concerning math and science I generally accept as truth
For math at least, that's a fine policy. I've found almost no errors in the undergraduate-level and below math articles and have never been "burned" by just believing a formula or statement to be true. In my experience any math page that gets a decent amount of traffic has errors fixed very quickly. More obscure graduate-level topics have errors significantly more frequently that stick around much longer. (Anything beyond that is probably not on Wikipedia yet anyway.)
One thing the math pages are low on is citations, especially for lower-level material that an experienced mathematician can derive themselves quickly. Still, usually I don't care.
I wanted to mention that homosexuality is not as "biologically stupid" as one might expect. A remarkably large number of gay/lesbian couples raise children*, and many of those are biological, though there's also an argument that adoptive parents benefit evolution of the whole species if not the parents in particular. Here's an article where the partnered lesbian author had a child with an also-partnered gay friend. Raising the kid is apparently mostly the mothers' job, but the guys do stuff too: "It's ironic to us that I'm legally classified as a single mom when our daughter has an abundance of parents."
*See this report from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is the mainstream American pediatrician's professional organization. It's slightly old; the data below is based on the 2000 census. Some relevant bits:
*...the number of same-gender unmarried-partner households was 594691 in 2000 [ed: significantly undercounted; probably higher today too] * Nationwide, 34.3% of lesbian couples are raising children, and 22.3% of gay male couples are raising children (compared with 45.6% of married heterosexual and 43.1% of unmarried heterosexual couples raising children). * Six percent of same-gender couples are raising children who have been adopted compared with 5.1% of heterosexual married couples and 2.6% of unmarried heterosexual couples. * Although adoption is commonly thought to be the only way that gays and lesbians become parents, there are many paths to parenthood. Some have biological children from past heterosexual marital and nonmarital relationships, and some pursue surrogacy arrangements or undergo in vitro fertilization or alternative insemination with donor sperm.
By the way, that report is extremely pro-gay marriage. Any time I hear a "think of the children" argument against gay marriage, I think of the pediatricians who studied the issue in depth and concluded that it is not only unharmful but indeed helpful to children to allow gay marriage.
That's one of the explanations I've thought of. My current list of hypotheses (completely untested, mind you):
* More studying from social exclusion during adolescence
* Less emphasis on family starting during early adulthood
* Some genetic, womb-environmental, or early childhood-environmental factor causing both increased intelligence and homosexuality
* Increased acceptance of latent bisexuality amongst the intelligentsia, so smart bi people might have more sex with the same gender than dumb bi people
* Some brain anomaly resulting in both male and female thought patterns amongst homosexuals
* Increased focus on rationality early in life caused by sorting out one's sexuality and beliefs (homosexuals are far more likely to be atheist/agnostic, for instance)
Causation is as always very difficult, and there are lots of good candidate explanations here. In my own case I lean towards the third and fifth points. But I really have no idea with respect to general trends. I may have forgotten some of my hypotheses since I don't keep a list.
I'm sorry, but your criticism is exceedingly poor. I addressed your point already since I knew someone would bring it up. Quoting myself:
This "large tail" isn't enough to bring up the IQ of gay people as a full group since there aren't that many really smart people.
The tests you discuss (without citation) are probably from general population studies. I specifically talked about only the most intelligent people, which is a very different population. You also ignored my citation.
As for anecdotal evidence, it is indeed meaningful. It is not conclusive, merely suggestive. I understand full well the variability of measured statistics depending on the sample, but ignoring anecdotal evidence is just as bad as relying on it too much. Several independent pieces of anecdotal evidence can combine to be conclusive--fundamentally that's what studies do, combine lots of anecdotes in a controlled way to reach a reliable conclusion.
Oh, he was a sex object. He was far more than merely photogenic. Putting a guy that hot in that role makes it sexual. He was also extremely well-groomed--look at his hair and eyebrows--and he had sexy glasses on. His makeup gave him an extremely smooth face, which is one of the two main sexy male faces, the other being lots of stubble (cf. Ryan Reynolds).
I can certainly imagine the difference here being too subtle for many straight guys. I certainly didn't analyze the women.
Actually, science is pretty gay, since science has lots of smart people and smart people tend to be gay.
There is published evidence (sorry, paywall) of a moderately strong correlation between very high intelligence and homosexuality. That is, very smart people are significantly more likely to be gay than people of normal or even just somewhat high intelligence (the numbers I've seen are a factor of ~2-3). This "large tail" isn't enough to bring up the IQ of gay people as a full group since there aren't that many really smart people. The cause of this correlation is unclear (but also irrelevant to my point that science is pretty gay).
Homosexuality has been associated with high intelligence for a long time apart from published research. I'm reminded of the movie Bedazzled where Brendan Frasier's character wishes to be smart and cultured ("isn't secular humanism yummy?") and the devil who grants the wish also makes him gay. I'm also reminded of Plato's Symposium, where he compared homosexuality to philosophy:
"Homosexuality," Plato wrote, "is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love-all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce."
(Translation taken from here. It should be noted that Plato's views changed over time.)
Finally, my personal anecdotal evidence agrees with the conclusion that STEM people are far more likely to be gay than average. My college was highly competitive and had almost exclusively STEM majors. My dorm had a huge number of gay people, something like 1 in 5 compared to the national average of something like 1 in 20. I myself am a very intelligent gay mathematician.
Because he was hot. It's like they screwed up and made an ad appealing to men instead of women. They should have had a bunch of attractive male scientists strutting around a pretty but not-too-pretty female scientist.
I gave the video 11 minutes and never got past the "crazy shit" stage. He seems to ramble from one irrelevant line of thought to the next while only rarely getting to a point that's somewhere between mildly insightful and rather trivial (eg. people tend to feel the emotions they see in others, as when a crowd gets fired up by a frontman; he gave no example, I supplied this one). By far his most important asset as a speaker is his extremely calm, almost otherworldly delivery. It dresses up his lackluster content in the guise of a metaphysical guru who just "knows things".
That said, the 2 hour presentation probably has a few minutes' worth of insight if you can stomach it. I could not, though I would read a page of notes derived from it by someone more... sane.
During one of my dad's heart surgeries, they kept him semi-conscious with Versed. He curses the person running the anesthesia to this day for not giving him enough Versed since he remembers much of the procedure, including the doctors discussing how much energy to use to shock his heart out of fibrillation.
That said, I wonder if using too little Versed is sometimes the culprit in the PTSD type symptoms you're discussing (which my dad has, for that procedure and other reasons).
There are so many problems with this story. It should never have been posted.
1. It's sponsored in part by ZoneAlarm, and it repeatedly says people should use more security software without discussing the efficacy of that software. 2. The opening sentence is stupid on two fronts:
[A new] report found that 18 – 25s are more confident in their security knowledge than 56 – 65s, but have experienced more security issues in the past two years compared to older users.
People's subjective measure of their confidence in security knowledge is a worthless statistic, and younger people use technology far, far more than older people so of course you'd expect them to experience more security issues.
3. "In comparison, 56 – 65s are more concerned about security and privacy and are twice as likely to protect their computers with additional security software." The implication being more security software = good. Like if you have MSE already you should really get Norton or maybe buy ZoneAlarm.
4. "Computer security increases in priority with age" This is completely irrelevant without further discussion (that's not provided). Older people might overprioritize just as younger people might underprioritize, but they jump to the second conclusion since it suits their advertisement.
5. "respondents aged 18 – 25 are less likely to use paid antivirus, 3rd-party firewalls, or integrated security suites than 56 – 65s. 45% of 18 – 25s view security software as too expensive in comparison to 37% of 56 – 65s." Yet again, conflict of interest, and even then the percentages they do list are not terribly dissimilar and with smallish sample sizes could be statistically indistinguishable. Of course no error bars were reported.
All in all, this is basically an advertisement for ZoneAlarm with irrelevant and questionable statistics (that to be fair are probably not technically wrong) that should never have been posted to/. Again! Bad editors.
I think the novelty is in a new motion tracking technique. The video starts with color change tracking (probably because it's so dramatic) but switches to motion about halfway through. The MIT news report closes with a UC Berkeley professor's comments:
"This approach is both simpler and allows you to see some things that you couldn't see with that old approach," Agrawala says. "The simplicity of the approach makes it something that has the possibility for application in a number of places. I think we'll see a lot of people implementing it because it's fairly straightforward."
For others like me who wonder about these things, Udmurt is one of the two official languages of the Russian republic (similar to a US state) of Udmurtia (the other being Russian). It uses an extended Cyrillic alphabet and has around half a million native speakers.
That is a very good point, thank you. I've updated my guide (though of course I can't edit the above). I have to admit my TAS knowledge is weak; I could only stand the episodes once, and even then many were quite painful so I don't remember them well. Perhaps one day I'll rewatch them for completeness' sake....
Slashdot Mirror
she was focusing on the wrong aspects of the graph. Graphs are data, not works of art.
That's preposterous. Graphs are often works of art--just look at any math book catalog, they're filled with pretty graphs meant primarily to catch the eye. Fractal art is another example I'm personally familiar with. Sure I might be graphing a representation of growth rates of iterated complex functions over variable start positions, but I don't particularly care when creating a nice fractal image.
Your implication that she doesn't have the mental capacity to fully understand a linear graph and simultaneously have aesthetic concerns about it is stupid and perhaps sexist. Your entire remark is just idiotic; perhaps you're trolling.
Anecdotal evidence isn't even suggestive. It's just raw uncontrolled data points. You cannot draw inferences from it.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong on this point. Anecdotal evidence is generally agreed to be suggestive. You cited Wikipedia in your other reply, so I will too:
Anecdotal evidence is considered dubious support of a claim; it is accepted only in lieu of more solid evidence.
(Source.)
These assorted definitions agree (I've only quoted pieces):
* cannot prove anything in themselves but sometimes provide leads for useful research
* tend to support a conclusion of discrimination
* can be useful to generate hypotheses
* Often construed to prove nothing, because life would be much easier if it did (see wishful thinking). [I must say this is an odd definition]
* Anecdotal evidence is unreliable evidence
* evidence that has not been confirmed by controlled scientific methods
It can suggest the truth, but it is certainly unreliable. It can support inferences such as, "maybe X occurs with Y". It cannot support inferences such as "X occurs with Y" (though my citation did that duty in my original post; I only offered anecdotal evidence because my main evidence was behind a paywall).
Aggregating anecdotal data is NOT what studies do because such data is never controlled.
Actually, you are partly right. It seems most of the definitions of anecdotal evidence explicitly disallow data taken from controlled experiments, though some are more general and do not include this requirement. I was working with the more general definition. For instance, I would call a single individual's survey results taken in isolation anecdotal evidence even if they came from a controlled study. In that sense my statements were true.
Again, as a math major you should realize this.
That is a mildly annoying rhetorical device. You were incorrect (such data is sometimes controlled, depending on who you ask, and I'm not the only one), but even if you were correct, one should only expect an applied math major to necessarily have knowledge in this area. My major was essentially pure.
I didn't debate the truth of your statement on homosexual male brains, just its relevance. Again, I was discussing only the most intelligent people. Most of the citations on the Wikipedia article are irrelevant here, though I did take the time to glance through this one. The subjects were not differentiated based on intelligence and were indeed taken from the general population in that respect, as I suggested. There was no attempt at figuring out what fraction of each population was highly intelligent, for instance (and the sample sizes were miniscule anyway; the studies my citation relied on had tens of thousands of participants).
As for others providing criticism of my citation, actually only one person provided any sort of criticism of it, and they admitted not being able to read it. I was actually hoping for an informed social scientist's opinion on the article, especially considering I wasn't able to find similar results (though it is quite new).
I cited Plato because he came from a vastly different environment than my other example, which was a B-movie from 12 years ago. Your criticism of Plato's relevance (as seems to be your pattern) is shallow. Certainly he got lots wrong, and many of his ideas were by today's standards just stupid, but that doesn't invalidate everything he said.
At the risk of repeating past mistakes, I am objectively very intelligent as measured on various tests and as supported by lots of anecdotal evidence. It's a statement of fact, nothing more; I'm not implying I can't make mistakes or am smarter than everyone else or something silly like that. I'm just saying I would fall in the highest intelligence category in the studies analyzed by the paper I linked.
I called science "gay" only as hyperbole, which several people found to be funny, as it was intended. I made my meaning clear shortly thereafter. Your semantic quibble is probably just because you don't like me and/or disagree with me on other issues.
I'm aware of Ioannidis's paper. He focused on biomedical research (though generalized his results) and repeatedly decried small sample sizes, large numbers of tests, and bias. The paper I linked uses three large data sets from two countries and does not appear to have been fishing for statistical significance by testing many things. I am unable to comment on bias in this case.
That you say "there is absolutely no reason to trust" the paper without reading it is remarkable. (I also find it strange that you don't have journal access after so long in research, but oh well.) As near as I can tell, you concluded solely based on your personal anecdotal evidence that the paper couldn't possibly be correct, justified that belief with an appeal to general inaccuracies in social science research, and then finally after some prodding actually looked into the paper and its author. From there you found a highly critical blog post about another blog post. My link was published. That's not to say Kanazawa is a particularly great source, just that your criticism is imperfect.
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine you were very good in your field with such superficial analyses. Maybe you used to take more care. I would like to mention that I'm not actually certain about my conclusion either (note my criticism of my own argument). I haven't found Kanazawa's results replicated elsewhere, though they are quite new, and my personal anecdotes are merely suggestive. In retrospect I should have been clearer about this originally; I fell prey to the desire to express very strong opinions (as you may have) simply to be heard online.
it's impossible for two rational agents to disagree over a matter of fact.
Not really. Constructivism in math is a broad name for a variety of beliefs about what types of proofs are valid. A classic example (my wording):
Theorem: There exist irrational positive numbers a and b such that a^b is nonetheless rational.
Proof: sqrt(2) is irrational, which has a proof basically everyone accepts. [Suppose sqrt(2) were rational, write the fraction in lowest terms, square both sides, deduce the numerator and denominator are both even, a contradiction, so sqrt(2) is not rational == irrational.]
sqrt(2)^sqrt(2) is either rational or irrational.
If rational: a=sqrt(2) and b=sqrt(2) works.
If irrational: a=sqrt(2)^sqrt(2) and b=sqrt(2) results in a^b = sqrt(2)^(sqrt(2)*sqrt(2)) = sqrt(2)^2 = 2, which is rational, so these work.
The proof above merely says that, of two candidates for a^b, at least one of them must satisfy all conditions. It does not tell us which candidate is correct, so the proof is rejected by constructivists. In such a case one hopes that each person can accept the other's argument subject to some assumptions they do not actually accept. This is the difference between accepting the truth of (A implies B) and accepting the truth of (A and (A implies B)).
[It happens that sqrt(2)^sqrt(2) is transcendental, so irrational, thanks to the Gelfand-Schneider theorem, which is itself objectively awesome, and that's a fact.]
I'm sorry, but I think you should grow a little thicker skin. There's another interpretation to this joke: the arts girl knew exactly what she was doing, liked a less steep line better aesthetically, and was confused by the engineers' lack of artistic concern. The professor knew precisely what was happening (being an art person himself) which is why he didn't crack a smile. There, dumb art girl joke turned into dumb smug engineer joke.
On the other end, my brother and ex-girlfriend were each psych majors in college and had to go through stats. Both failed it the first time (different schools, both had very large failure fractions in those classes). My brother in particular hated the course, though the second time he got a B without having the foggiest idea of what standard deviation means--I'm pretty sure they just used a massive curve because too many people were failing. Both of them embody math phobia. My ex eventually learned something of stats, my brother never did (and he's not using his degree either).
That said, I'd suggest stats needs to be directly useful to these people. My brother in particular complained about his difficult-to-understand professor who just wrote lots of formulas on the board all class period; he dutifully copied them down and did some mystical sort of pattern matching on tests (that I think were multiple choice). If I were asked to teach such a course, I'd try designing an overarching motivating example, where you make up an experiment, collect some data, and ask the pertinent questions for analyzing it, eg. "how confident can we be that this survey accurately reflects everyone's opinion?" Keep all the abstraction as far away as possible, keep motivating examples that are directly relevant to their studies close at hand, and test them on their ability to critically analyze papers and experimental data instead of their ability to solve stats problems. My 2c at least.
The best biologically beneficial explanation I've heard for homosexual animal behavior is that it reduces aggression when you have a surplus of males in a group. Exclusive homosexuality is very rare (nonexistent?) in animals besides humans though, so animal and human homosexuality aren't particularly comparable, even ignoring the huge intellectual, emotional, and "romantic"/mating style differences. As an exclusively homosexual human, I do once in a while wonder what the difference is that makes exclusive homosexuality nonexistent among say bonobos but existent in me. Maybe there is a further biological benefit?
My bet is actually on "biological accident". Humans got complicated mentally and sometimes some female wiring makes it into male brains and vice versa. Oh well.
By "smart people tend to be gay", I meant (and made clear two sentences later) that smart people tend to be gay more often than people in general tend to be gay, not something ridiculous like a majority of smart people are gay.
Your reasoning is quite poor in several places, which makes me disinclined to believe you over the published study I linked. Specifically...
* Your anecdotal evidence disagrees with the paper, so the paper that studied tens of thousands of people in two countries must be wrong.
* You say gay people "aren't 'special' in any way" yet your anecdotal evidence supports the opposite conclusion--that gay people are less likely that you would expect to be "very intelligent", considering you know none when you'd expect to know 1-2.
* You seem to believe in the utter equality of straight and gay people. This is of course inconsistent with you being "allergic to bias"--let the data speak for itself.
* Gay is popular recently, which should motivate gay people to make spurious "gay people are smart people" research. Wouldn't a lack of popularity motivate that, and a surplus of popularity make it unnecessary?
* Gay researchers/scientists are extremely susceptible to bias when studying gay issues. Change "gay" to "female" to see how silly this is; it would be preposterous to make female judges recuse themselves on abortion cases, for instance. The paper I cited discusses motivations briefly (I have no real idea if the researcher is gay; I suspect not):
However, I emphasize that my
findings have absolutely no practical importance. It is not like we can now use someone’s
intelligence to assess their homosexuality accurately. My approach to science is
decidedly basic, not applied (clinical or medical). I am entirely driven by the desire to
discover knowledge, not by its potential applications or implications
There is another paper (cited by this one; I can dig out the citation if you want...) where in the general population gay men's verbal scores beat straight men's, though lesbian's scores were lower than straight women's. What kind of crazy bias causes that?
* I personally am incapable of avoiding bias here since I "cherish" the idea that highly intelligent people are gay more often than people in general. I admit I find this idea appealing, but the truth is the truth. I don't shy away from nasty statistics, like this one: 19% of American men who have sex with men have HIV/AIDS. I don't claim to understand *why* the intelligence correlation exists, just that it does. I also made no judgement on whether the effect was good or bad; I just said that "science is gay" in this specific sense.
I also wanted to mention that I very much question your anecdotal evidence. If you know 20-30 "very intelligent" guys, you would presumably know well over 100 people, and you would expect something like 5 gay people in such a sample if it's at all representative, yet you "don't know any gay people". It's pretty easy to pass as straight, especially in a workplace context where it simply doesn't have to come up.
The studies were conducted in the US and the UK. Your alternative explanation is of course discussed in the paper:
Another possibility is that more intelligent individuals, rather than being truly more
homosexual in their sexual identity, expressed attraction, and sexual behaviour, are
more likely openly to admit that they are homosexual than less intelligent individuals.
[...]
There is no way for me to discover whether respondents may be misrepresenting
themselves in my data; just like any other user of these survey data, I am at the mercy
of their recorded responses. However, if more intelligent individuals are indeed more
likely openly to admit that they are homosexual, then one would think that more educated
individuals are equally more likely to be so candid. This alternative hypothesis
therefore cannot explain why education has a significantly negative association with
homosexuality in Studies 1 and 3 and no association at all in Study 2.
The best criticism of my argument I can think of is the link between intelligent homosexuals and scientists. I offered no evidence whatsoever to support the idea that smart gay people are approximately as likely as straight people to become scientists, and my main source says that homosexuality and education are sometimes negatively correlated. It goes on to say,
[...] One possibility is that the stress
and stigma associated with being gay and coming out make it more difficult for gay
children and adolescents to pursue higher education.
This offers a possible explanation for our differing anecdotes. Perhaps the stress and stigma above has gotten better in recent years, so the education/homosexuality correlation is time-dependent. I note that Studies 1 and 3 used older data/people than Study 2. Or perhaps not; this is social science after all, and there are always more hypotheses to test.
Now that the substance of my response is out of the way, I wanted to mention that I find your post annoying and essentially hypocritical. You call the research I cited "probably as flawed as it can be", a remarkably strong statement. To justify it you offered only an obvious criticism the paper discussed (certainly you didn't even glance at the conclusion section) and anecdotal evidence. You also offered no substantive criticism of my movie and Plato references, though of course they carry much, much less weight than the study anyway.
Talking down to me was also not helpful. Perhaps I shouldn't have called myself "very intelligent". I suspect it made several people including you want to lash out. I was hoping it could be taken as the statement of fact that it is, but that is probably too much to ask for on the internet.
the articles concerning math and science I generally accept as truth
For math at least, that's a fine policy. I've found almost no errors in the undergraduate-level and below math articles and have never been "burned" by just believing a formula or statement to be true. In my experience any math page that gets a decent amount of traffic has errors fixed very quickly. More obscure graduate-level topics have errors significantly more frequently that stick around much longer. (Anything beyond that is probably not on Wikipedia yet anyway.)
One thing the math pages are low on is citations, especially for lower-level material that an experienced mathematician can derive themselves quickly. Still, usually I don't care.
Hah, thanks for the laughs.
I wanted to mention that homosexuality is not as "biologically stupid" as one might expect. A remarkably large number of gay/lesbian couples raise children*, and many of those are biological, though there's also an argument that adoptive parents benefit evolution of the whole species if not the parents in particular. Here's an article where the partnered lesbian author had a child with an also-partnered gay friend. Raising the kid is apparently mostly the mothers' job, but the guys do stuff too: "It's ironic to us that I'm legally classified as a single mom when our daughter has an abundance of parents."
*See this report from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is the mainstream American pediatrician's professional organization. It's slightly old; the data below is based on the 2000 census. Some relevant bits:
* ...the number of same-gender unmarried-partner households was 594691 in 2000 [ed: significantly undercounted; probably higher today too]
* Nationwide, 34.3% of lesbian couples are raising children, and 22.3% of gay male couples are raising children (compared with 45.6% of married heterosexual and 43.1% of unmarried heterosexual couples raising children).
* Six percent of same-gender couples are raising children who have been adopted compared with 5.1% of heterosexual married couples and 2.6% of unmarried heterosexual couples.
* Although adoption is commonly thought to be the only way that gays and lesbians become parents, there are many paths to parenthood. Some have biological children from past heterosexual marital and nonmarital relationships, and some pursue surrogacy arrangements or undergo in vitro fertilization or alternative insemination with donor sperm.
By the way, that report is extremely pro-gay marriage. Any time I hear a "think of the children" argument against gay marriage, I think of the pediatricians who studied the issue in depth and concluded that it is not only unharmful but indeed helpful to children to allow gay marriage.
That's one of the explanations I've thought of. My current list of hypotheses (completely untested, mind you):
* More studying from social exclusion during adolescence
* Less emphasis on family starting during early adulthood
* Some genetic, womb-environmental, or early childhood-environmental factor causing both increased intelligence and homosexuality
* Increased acceptance of latent bisexuality amongst the intelligentsia, so smart bi people might have more sex with the same gender than dumb bi people
* Some brain anomaly resulting in both male and female thought patterns amongst homosexuals
* Increased focus on rationality early in life caused by sorting out one's sexuality and beliefs (homosexuals are far more likely to be atheist/agnostic, for instance)
Causation is as always very difficult, and there are lots of good candidate explanations here. In my own case I lean towards the third and fifth points. But I really have no idea with respect to general trends. I may have forgotten some of my hypotheses since I don't keep a list.
I'm sorry, but your criticism is exceedingly poor. I addressed your point already since I knew someone would bring it up. Quoting myself:
This "large tail" isn't enough to bring up the IQ of gay people as a full group since there aren't that many really smart people.
The tests you discuss (without citation) are probably from general population studies. I specifically talked about only the most intelligent people, which is a very different population. You also ignored my citation.
As for anecdotal evidence, it is indeed meaningful. It is not conclusive, merely suggestive. I understand full well the variability of measured statistics depending on the sample, but ignoring anecdotal evidence is just as bad as relying on it too much. Several independent pieces of anecdotal evidence can combine to be conclusive--fundamentally that's what studies do, combine lots of anecdotes in a controlled way to reach a reliable conclusion.
Sorry if I was unclear. The full sentence with the unwritten words was...
smart people tend to be gay [more often than people in general]
Still, I was quite clear about my meaning later in the post and I find your point rather pedantic.
Oh, he was a sex object. He was far more than merely photogenic. Putting a guy that hot in that role makes it sexual. He was also extremely well-groomed--look at his hair and eyebrows--and he had sexy glasses on. His makeup gave him an extremely smooth face, which is one of the two main sexy male faces, the other being lots of stubble (cf. Ryan Reynolds).
I can certainly imagine the difference here being too subtle for many straight guys. I certainly didn't analyze the women.
Science isn't gay.
Actually, science is pretty gay, since science has lots of smart people and smart people tend to be gay.
There is published evidence (sorry, paywall) of a moderately strong correlation between very high intelligence and homosexuality. That is, very smart people are significantly more likely to be gay than people of normal or even just somewhat high intelligence (the numbers I've seen are a factor of ~2-3). This "large tail" isn't enough to bring up the IQ of gay people as a full group since there aren't that many really smart people. The cause of this correlation is unclear (but also irrelevant to my point that science is pretty gay).
Homosexuality has been associated with high intelligence for a long time apart from published research. I'm reminded of the movie Bedazzled where Brendan Frasier's character wishes to be smart and cultured ("isn't secular humanism yummy?") and the devil who grants the wish also makes him gay. I'm also reminded of Plato's Symposium, where he compared homosexuality to philosophy:
"Homosexuality," Plato wrote, "is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love-all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce."
(Translation taken from here. It should be noted that Plato's views changed over time.)
Finally, my personal anecdotal evidence agrees with the conclusion that STEM people are far more likely to be gay than average. My college was highly competitive and had almost exclusively STEM majors. My dorm had a huge number of gay people, something like 1 in 5 compared to the national average of something like 1 in 20. I myself am a very intelligent gay mathematician.
Because he was hot. It's like they screwed up and made an ad appealing to men instead of women. They should have had a bunch of attractive male scientists strutting around a pretty but not-too-pretty female scientist.
I gave the video 11 minutes and never got past the "crazy shit" stage. He seems to ramble from one irrelevant line of thought to the next while only rarely getting to a point that's somewhere between mildly insightful and rather trivial (eg. people tend to feel the emotions they see in others, as when a crowd gets fired up by a frontman; he gave no example, I supplied this one). By far his most important asset as a speaker is his extremely calm, almost otherworldly delivery. It dresses up his lackluster content in the guise of a metaphysical guru who just "knows things".
That said, the 2 hour presentation probably has a few minutes' worth of insight if you can stomach it. I could not, though I would read a page of notes derived from it by someone more... sane.
During one of my dad's heart surgeries, they kept him semi-conscious with Versed. He curses the person running the anesthesia to this day for not giving him enough Versed since he remembers much of the procedure, including the doctors discussing how much energy to use to shock his heart out of fibrillation.
That said, I wonder if using too little Versed is sometimes the culprit in the PTSD type symptoms you're discussing (which my dad has, for that procedure and other reasons).
There are so many problems with this story. It should never have been posted.
1. It's sponsored in part by ZoneAlarm, and it repeatedly says people should use more security software without discussing the efficacy of that software.
2. The opening sentence is stupid on two fronts:
[A new] report found that 18 – 25s are more confident in their security knowledge than 56 – 65s, but have experienced more security issues in the past two years compared to older users.
People's subjective measure of their confidence in security knowledge is a worthless statistic, and younger people use technology far, far more than older people so of course you'd expect them to experience more security issues.
3. "In comparison, 56 – 65s are more concerned about security and privacy and are twice as likely to protect their computers with additional security software."
The implication being more security software = good. Like if you have MSE already you should really get Norton or maybe buy ZoneAlarm.
4. "Computer security increases in priority with age"
This is completely irrelevant without further discussion (that's not provided). Older people might overprioritize just as younger people might underprioritize, but they jump to the second conclusion since it suits their advertisement.
5. "respondents aged 18 – 25 are less likely to use paid antivirus, 3rd-party firewalls, or integrated security suites than 56 – 65s. 45% of 18 – 25s view security software as too expensive in comparison to 37% of 56 – 65s."
Yet again, conflict of interest, and even then the percentages they do list are not terribly dissimilar and with smallish sample sizes could be statistically indistinguishable. Of course no error bars were reported.
All in all, this is basically an advertisement for ZoneAlarm with irrelevant and questionable statistics (that to be fair are probably not technically wrong) that should never have been posted to /. Again! Bad editors.
I think the novelty is in a new motion tracking technique. The video starts with color change tracking (probably because it's so dramatic) but switches to motion about halfway through. The MIT news report closes with a UC Berkeley professor's comments:
"This approach is both simpler and allows you to see some things that you couldn't see with that old approach," Agrawala says. "The simplicity of the approach makes it something that has the possibility for application in a number of places. I think we'll see a lot of people implementing it because it's fairly straightforward."
something is more deeply wrong than him just being out sick today.
*cue the rumor mill*
Sounds like throat cancer.
For others like me who wonder about these things, Udmurt is one of the two official languages of the Russian republic (similar to a US state) of Udmurtia (the other being Russian). It uses an extended Cyrillic alphabet and has around half a million native speakers.
That is a very good point, thank you. I've updated my guide (though of course I can't edit the above). I have to admit my TAS knowledge is weak; I could only stand the episodes once, and even then many were quite painful so I don't remember them well. Perhaps one day I'll rewatch them for completeness' sake....