October 2007

Clearly Intelligence Isn’t Solely Genetic and Environmental

ArchPundit October 22, 2007 1 Comment

Hawks to put home games on cable. 

Speaking of Morons Ranting about Human Intelligence

ArchPundit October 22, 2007 No Comments

Henry addresses Sully’s vapidness….

The nut of the argument is here from the article Henry links to:

To summarize what follows below (“shorter sloth”, as it were), the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can’t tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn’t distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.

The worst thing about the continuing reliance on factor analysis is that it simply isn’t a tool that can do that. In some sense, back when we didn’t have laptops that could do things in 3 minutes what took 3 days even just 12 years ago let alone 30 years ago, factor analysis provided a very good first step to analyzing data and do what I call feeling out the data.

Those trying to impute causality with factor analysis are wrong on two different levels. First, the method is not capable of doing so–but yet, Charles Murray wrote a book using it at the core of his argument.

Second, correlation does not mean causation. For causal determinations, one must first choose a study design that eliminates other possible explanations and offer a theory that can be tested by a significance test that is capable of accepting or rejecting the null hypothesis. Statistical analysis can contribute to the determination of causation, but only in a very specific study design that produces a controlled set of observations for testing.
In the case of Murray’s work, he doesn’t test his hypothesis, he simply finds a correlation and jumps up and down for hundreds of worthless pages. A bunch of gullible morons like Sullivan think it looks sophisticated and declare those who call bullshit are somehow silencing groundbreaking work. That would be groundbreaking work if it were perhaps done in 1900, not 1995 or 2007. It was shoddy bullshit that never should have been published by a reputable publisher.
I’ll copy the following simply because it is as parsimonious of a statement as possible:

If I take any group of variables which are positively correlated, there will, as a matter of algebraic necessity, be a single dominant general factor, which describes more of the variance than any other, and all of them will be “positively loaded” on this factor, i.e., positively correlated with it. Similarly, if you do hierarchical factor analysis, you will always be able to find a single higher-order factor which loads positively onto the lower-order factors and, through them, the actual observables [8] What psychologists sometimes call the “positive manifold” condition is enough, in and of itself, to guarantee that there will appear to be a general factor. Since intelligence tests are made to correlate with each other, it follows trivially that there must appear to be a general factor of intelligence. This is true whether or not there really is a single variable which explains test scores or not.

These issues are non-trivial. My current boss was trained some decades ago as a psychologist and he always wants to start off with a factor analysis. I usually look up, squint a bit, and shake my head. It’s not that it isn’t useful, it’s just such a basic step, I don’t think of it as anything that interesting to bother mentioning in most work. Of course, he being trained in cognitive psychology understands the limitations of the factor analysis and part of the reason he has had my predecessor and I around is that we know modern statistics and we look up, squint a bit, and shake our heads when he’s all excited about something we aren’t terribly interested in.

and more:

I am not sure what the oddest aspect of this situation is, because there are so many. It may be a statistician’s bias, but the things I keep dwelling on are the failures of methodology, which are not, alas, confined to all-correlations-all-the-time psychologists, but also seen in the right (that is, wrong) sort of labor-market sociologist, economists who regress countries’ growth rates on government policies, etc., etc. As the late sociologist Aage Sorensen said (e.g. here), the sort of social science which tries to identify causal effects by calculating regression coefficients or factor loadings stops where the scientist’s work ought, properly, to begin. (A more charitable view would be that these researchers are piling up descriptions, and hoping that someone will come along, any decade now, with explanations.) Many psychometric and econometric theorists know much better, but they seem to have little influence on practice.

I’d argue that quasi-experimental designs also work very well, though that’s a far longer discussion.

The Illinois Legislative Session of 2007: A Fable.

ArchPundit October 18, 2007 1 Comment

VIa Rich

Dan Hynes sums it all up

The Illinois Legislative Session of 2007: A Fable.

“Once upon a time, in a Land of Lincoln, a Governor presented a budget in a lovely town called Springfield. This Governor was great and generous and had a tremendous head of hair. And the wise and diligent people who needed to approve the budget, the members of the General Assembly, invited the Governor to their home to talk about one part of his plan. He did. And when he left their house, the members did what any courteous hosts would do: they voted 107-0 against him. And told him he was always welcome to stop by.

Though the Governor declared this a great victory, the streets of Springfield were strangely free of dancing or parades or general merriment.

Instead, a great black cloud covered the Land.

And the members of the General Assembly knew, to save the day, they’d have to agree on some kind of plan. So their leaders set down to work, day and night, and agreed on nothing of consequence.

And the cloud remained.

Now danger was approaching, and everyone said that they needed more time — so that they could call each other the worst names they could think of. Nasty, terrible names. Like when someone called the Governor a demagogue. And when the Governor called the Speaker of the House —a Republican.

And then things got even worse. The Governor said that God was on his side, and then unleashed God’s fury against a Senator from Moline. And the men who led the General Assembly insisted that they were absolutely, positively right, and whenever discussing the Governor, took God’s name in vain.

God was generally not pleased.

And the cloud remained.

But just when things looked their worst — just in the nick of time — knowing all that was at stake for the people they served, the good and decent leaders came together – in courtrooms all across Illinois. You see, the Governor had said that the members should meet at 2 o’clock. But the members decided to get together at 10 o’clock. That could mean only one thing, in the name of truth and justice, and everything good in the world: sue the bums!.

So in the happiest of happy endings, the Governor sued the Speaker of the House. And just to make sure that the Speaker’s clerk didn’t feel lonely, he sued him, too. And for a moment, the Governor thought about suing a maid at the Statehouse Inn because she had once said hello to the Speaker. But, in the rush to get back for a Cubs playoff game, he forgot all about that.

And the cloud remains over the Land.

Some say that the Governor is acting crazy. Some say that the Speaker is acting crazy. Some say that the other leaders are acting crazy.

But all of the people in the Land of Lincoln do agree on one thing. Their leaders are always, always, always putting them first.”

THE END.

To echo Rich–please say there is video of this.

And Dan, more like this please. You are a great official, but need up the personality quotient a bit in public.