[HN Gopher] I disagree with Turing and Kahneman regarding statis...
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I disagree with Turing and Kahneman regarding statistical evidence
(2014)
Author : acqbu
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-07-14 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| arolihas wrote:
| Reminds me a lot of Beware the Man of One Study by Scott
| Alexander
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/s/BQBqPowfxjvoee8jw/p/ythFNoiAotjv...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| isn't he a eugenicist? I know everyone loves to "separate the
| artist from the art" or w/e but that one thing really does make
| me distrustful of every single other thing he writes. What are
| his goals, how does this fit into them.
| lliamander wrote:
| Almost certainly not in the sense that most people might
| object to (so you are committing the "Non-central Fallacy").
| And your distrust sounds franlky paranoid.
| Marinus wrote:
| Thats a liber and a smear. I expect better of HN.
| arolihas wrote:
| I'm sorry I wasn't aware of any of that. I think the post I
| shared is fairly innocuous though and doesn't promote or
| contribute to an agenda of ethnic cleansing.
| nnq wrote:
| "Eugenics" is a wide term. What part of it are you against
| strongly enough to completely condemn anyone involved with
| the idea?
|
| At the most basic romantic selection level we're all doing it
| after all... it's how evolution works.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There is no interpretation I can think of whereby Alan Turing
| or Daniel Kahneman could be considered eugenicists, so I have
| to assume you mean Scott. And no, Scott is not a eugenicist.
| He's a psychiatrist who is also extremely critical of
| statistical deficiencies and cognitive biases, especially as
| they play out in social science research and science
| journalism, so that is his goal with all of these think
| pieces on why some headline making the rounds is probably
| wrong. Not much different than Andrew Gelman in that respect,
| though far more of an amateur, that is, Scott is very far
| from an expert in statistics, though he's pretty good at
| reading scientific research.
|
| What I imagine you've heard is people who have seen the way
| he treats his comments section and his approach to discourse
| as a commitment to hearing all sides. Before he went to
| Substack, he took down his blog because of a NY Times hit
| piece alleging he supported Charles Murray, which wasn't
| really true, but he was critical of universities not allowing
| Charles Murray to speak. He is also fairly known for his
| "tend his garden" thing on his own blog, which means he
| favors people who are polite in the way they comment over
| people who don't hold abhorrent points of view. For instance,
| his blog is about the only non-explicitly racist place you'll
| still see Steve Sailer on a regular basis, who is definitely
| a eugenicist. But to Scott, he doesn't really mind if you
| spend 90% of your commenting effort over several decades
| committed to the real problem with America being that our
| worst cities are overrun with genetically inferior black
| people, just so long as you're polite about it and don't
| start fights in his comments.
|
| The unfortunate side effect of this that I don't think Scott
| has ever grappled with and maybe never will now that he's
| making money from it is that his blog has gradually fallen
| prey to the Gab/8chan effect that being the last person to
| tolerate bad people means your blog is going to become
| overrun with bad people. His comments sections have
| tremendously deteriorated over the years because of that.
| Everybody is very polite and friendly with each other while
| discussing incel theory and the problems of low IQ in the
| global south.
|
| That said, Scott himself still overwhelmingly writes about
| nerd topics, like his absolute obsession with prediction
| markets. It's practically every other post. Just avoid the
| open thread posts that where the comment direction is
| entirely driven by the audience rather than by him selecting
| a topic.
|
| And, I guess for completeness, I believe someone on Twitter
| once posted "evidence" of Scott admitting in private that he
| believed blacks were genetically predisposed to low IQ. He
| has never publicly said anything like that, so I guess take
| the word of some random person on the Internet that produced
| a collection of pixels with whatever size grain of salt you
| think that warrants.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Before he went to Substack, he took down his blog because
| of a NY Times hit piece...
|
| That's a distortion. He took down is blog because the NYT
| journalist planned to use his real name, which is their
| typical practice. They didn't even have to break confidence
| to find it out, because he had _publicly_ made the link in
| published work. This was also before he (or anyone else)
| saw the article. He and his fans seem to be under the false
| impression that their extremely-online internet-forum mores
| apply to all of society, and were outraged.
|
| It's also an exaggeration to call the article a "hit
| piece." It wasn't glowing fluff, and that's all. I don't
| think he and his fans would have been satisfied with
| anything except an uncritical report of how they see and
| understand themselves.
| astrange wrote:
| leephillips wrote:
| I thought the problem with the _NYT_ article was that it
| doxxed him, a particularly nasty thing to so to a
| practicing psychiatrist.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > isn't he a eugenicist? I know everyone loves to "separate
| the artist from the art" or w/e but that one thing really
| does make me distrustful of every single other thing he
| writes. What are his goals, how does this fit into them.
|
| IIRC, he's not a eugenicist, but shares one of their big
| assumptions (that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic
| groups are smarter than others).
| astrange wrote:
| His commenters are the kind of people who have decided
| this:
|
| > that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are
| smarter than others
|
| is true because if it was true, Berkeley feminists with
| humanities degrees wouldn't want to admit that, and they
| find those people annoying, therefore the option that makes
| you go "well we just have to face the facts" must be the
| case.
|
| Of course, the first part of the sentence doesn't imply
| half the things they think it does, certainly doesn't imply
| the second, and even then the implications "...and it must
| be genetic" "...and there's nothing we can do about it"
| "...and that's why we're more virtuous than those other
| people" would not necessarily be true.
| dekhn wrote:
| If by "he" you mean Turing, then no, not in the sense that
| Pearson, Galton, or Fisher would be considered eugenicists
| today. Nor in the sense that Charles Davenport, who ran CSHL
| and the Eugenics Office, would be considered a eugenicist
| today.
|
| Not sure about Alexander, I don't really pay attention to
| what he writes about medical biology.
| Veen wrote:
| > isn't he a eugenicist?
|
| No. Although the term is widely abused and misapplied, so he
| might fall within whatever definition of eugenicist you're
| working with.
| zehaeva wrote:
| "No, but maybe for various definitions of the word" is a
| hilarious take.
|
| Maybe letting people know for what definitions he might
| qualify?
| Veen wrote:
| My understanding is that he believes people should be
| able to exert some level of control over the genetics of
| their offspring, but that he is strongly opposed to any
| type of coercive eugenics. Some people would consider him
| a eugenicist because of his position.
| threatofrain wrote:
| I do consider that eugenics, but I just wouldn't use that
| term because people's brains turn off when they hear that
| term. It's a useful term if we want to discuss social
| policy, but only if people have the emotional reservoir
| for nuance.
|
| All societies practice eugenics to some extent, whether
| in banning relatives from marrying, choosing abortion
| when the child would have terrible life conditions, or
| selecting mates based on biologically traits like beauty.
|
| From the first paragraph of Wikipedia:
|
| > Eugenics (/ju:'dZenIks/ yoo-JEN-iks; from Ancient Greek
| eu (eu) 'good, well', and -genes (genes) 'come into
| being, growing')[1][2] is a set of beliefs and practices
| that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human
| population,[3][4] historically by excluding people and
| groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to
| be superior.[5] In recent years, the term has seen a
| revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new
| technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a
| heated debate on whether these technologies should be
| called eugenics or not.[6]
| tartoran wrote:
| > exert some level of control over the genetics of their
| offspring
|
| Isn't that what choosing a partner to start a family with
| does?
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| Yes, but doing it naturally and unconsciously makes it
| not evil
|
| There can be no public sanity regarding anything that was
| done by people in the wrong side of fresh (historical)
| memory
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| certainly, and you've chosen your blonde, blue-eyed
| partner attentively, but those traits are recessive, so
| when you find that your children will not have them you
| want to abort and try again.
|
| slippery-sloping the ideas of control very quickly leads
| to nightmarish scenarios, of course slopes tend not to be
| slippery just because we fear they may be, but sometimes
| the slipperiness of a slope will seem not a problem until
| the right social movement comes along and takes advantage
| of it, best to be prepared is the pessimist's take.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| "No, but he encourages them to show up at his parties"
| samatman wrote:
| He doesn't, but he does qualify as someone on the receiving
| end of content-free smears and libels, and 'eugenicist' is
| a useful term of abuse if you want to convince others that
| someone is a bad person.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Perhaps one should also beware of the study by one man. I have
| a vague recollection of hearing that, at the time Turing was
| expressing his opinion of telepathy, there seemed to be
| experimental evidence for it, but it turned out that all the
| evidence came from one person, using unsound methods
| (including, IIRC, counting "one before" or "one after" guesses
| as successes if the results had higher than the expected
| frequency of one of those outcomes.)
|
| Tentatively, that person may be Joseph Banks Rhine.
| googlryas wrote:
| Yes - I had to read into that part of Turing, since I had
| never previously come across his views on ESP, but it seems
| like his error was not that he believed the statistics to be
| more powerful than they were - but rather he was too
| credulous in believing there weren't charlatans intentionally
| fudging the stats in order to help their point. Basically -
| the stats _were_ powerful, but they were just fake.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Discussion from 8 years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263243
| randcraw wrote:
| > It's good to have an open mind.
|
| Is it? That's the very basis for error that begat this article.
| In fact, Turing's and Kahneman's minds were too open. They didn't
| express sufficient reservation by demanding more rigorous tests
| of those claims.
|
| Perhaps a better maxim would be, "It's good to have a mind that's
| open just enough to entertain the impossible."
| [deleted]
| arto wrote:
| "By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that
| our brains drop out." -- Richard Dawkins
| clint wrote:
| Its funny, I considered Turing's state of mind to be not open
| enough to the possibility that he might be wrong.
| n4r9 wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. "This claim is true and you mustn't
| disagree" is quite closed-minded.
| mr_toad wrote:
| In addition to statistical evidence people should really
| examine the plausibility of the mechanism in question. Most
| accounts of ESP have no description of how it might actually
| work. The theories are typically dualistic, vitalistic and even
| plain magical.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| @dang: the original title should be "I disagree with Alan Turing
| and Daniel Kahneman regarding the strength of statistical
| evidence", the way it was edited it became... clickbait ?
| pvg wrote:
| Email this stuff in if you want it to reach a dang.
| function_seven wrote:
| Probably done to get it under 80 characters.
|
| Maybe I Disagree with Turing & Kahneman
| Regarding the Strength of Statistical Evidence
|
| will work? It's exactly 80.
| kqr wrote:
| The conclusion is a bit at odds with the rest of the piece:
|
| > And that's interesting. When stupid people make a mistake,
| that's no big deal. But when brilliant people make a mistake,
| it's worth noting.
|
| Maybe not. In the words of the author,
|
| > maybe these are real effects being discovered, but you should
| at least consider the possibility that you're chasing noise. When
| a striking result appears in the dataset, it's possible that this
| result does not represent an enduring truth or even a pattern in
| the general population but rather is just an artifact of a
| particular small and noisy dataset.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Clearly brilliant people saying that something that later turns
| out to be noise is _statistically undeniable_ signal is worth
| noting. I 'm not sure what you're seeing here.
| [deleted]
| ev7 wrote:
| Kahneman admitted that some of the studies his book cited were
| underpowered here:
|
| https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
| jstx1 wrote:
| Kahneman's full quote is just embarrassing:
|
| > The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not
| an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical
| flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major
| conclusions of these studies are true. More important, you must
| accept that they are true about you.
|
| So so arrogant, and he ended up being wrong about it too. It's
| very hard to take him seriously after reading this.
| glacials wrote:
| Hard not to chuckle at:
|
| > People have erroneous intuitions about the laws of chance. In
| particular, they regard a sample randomly drawn from a population
| as highly representative, that is, similar to the population in
| all essential characteristics. _The prevalence of the belief and
| its unfortunate consequences for psvchological research are
| illustrated by the responses of professional psychologists to a
| questionnaire concerning research decisions._
|
| (emphasis mine)
|
| Not only does the statement say that "people" make this mistake
| then go on to cite a questionnaire only of professional
| psychologists, but the questionnaire is the prototypical non-
| random random sample the very psychologists taking it are
| allegedly proving misinformation about. Questionnaires select for
| people with the time, inclination, and attention to start and
| then finish a questionnaire.
|
| Infamously, experiments held at universities bias towards
| undergrads. Experiments that reward participation bias towards
| people motivated by the reward. Experiments that don't reward
| participation bias towards people good-natured enough to
| contribute just for science.
|
| Randomness is hard.
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