Eldritch Crank's List: social science

They start by debunking published (and often well-publicized) social psychology findings that seem to suggest moral or intellectual superiority on the part of liberals over conservatives, which smartly serves to debunk both the notion that social psychology is bereft of conservatives because they're not smart enough to cut it, and that groupthink doesn't produce shoddy science.

That summarizes The Bell Curve’s predictions. While you’ve been lied to endlessly about how Herrnstein and Murray were bad people for writing The Bell Curve, the reality is that they weren’t cynical enough.

Racial differences in psychopathic behavior persist even when IQ is held constant, and the same racial differences are found in essentially every kind of measurable behavior that reflects psychopathic personality. The most plausible explanation for these differences is that just as there are racial differences in average IQ, there are racial differences in what could be called “average personality,” with blacks showing greater psychopathic tendencies. The argument that white “racism” is responsible for black social pathology is increasingly unconvincing.

Introduction

The five-factor model of personality (FFM) is a set of five broad trait dimensions or domains, often referred to as the “Big Five”: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism (sometimes named by its polar opposite, Emotional Stability), and Openness to Experience (sometimes named Intellect).

A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words” that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” It also contains surprises: “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.”

The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a “proto-Eurasiatic” language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world’s people.

Cold Reading: How to Convince Strangers That You Know All About Them

What good social science has revealed—that parents matter, genes matter, race matters, sex matters, and IQ matters—is the opposite of what the vast majority of social scientists wanted to discover.

Ironically, social science has been quite successful at demonstrating the failures of social engineering.

Murray concludes, “a significant and growing proportion of the American population is losing the virtues required to be functioning members of a free society.” This slow erosion is seldom discussed, however, because on the other side of the class chasm, the upper reaches “have become so isolated that they are often oblivious to the nature of the problems that exist elsewhere.” Murray has ranked every zip code in the country by class, and one of his more informative findings is that vast swathes of the greater Washington D.C. area, which increasingly monopolizes public discourse, rank at the 95th percentile or higher.

As coauthor Flynn famously pointed out, raw scores on IQ tests all over the world have been rising for generations (what Herrnstein and Murray approvingly named the “Flynn Effect”). For example, US Army psychometricians were shocked at WWI draftees’ dimness but were happier with WWII’s more on-the-ball conscripts. Was this due to more schooling, better nutrition, less hookworm and cretinism, more mental stimulation from radio, movies, and automobiles, more scientific conceptual models in common circulation, something else, or all of the above? As the Ameliorists admit, there’s no consensus on the Flynn Effect’s causes.

That's what real world applications are up against. They're not an awesome pilot project with everyone pulling together and a lot of political push behind them; they're being rolled out into a system that already has a very well established mindset, and a comprehensive body of rules. The new program implemented by the old rules often turns out to be worse than the old program.

Debbie Nathan's "Sybil Exposed" is about psychiatric fads, outrageous therapeutic malpractice, thwarted ambition run amok, and several other subjects, but above all, it is a book about a book. Specifically, that book is "Sybil," purportedly the true story of a woman with 16 personalities.

A lock of hair, collected by a British anthropologist a century ago, has yielded the first genome of an Australian Aborigine, along with insights into the earliest migration from the ancestral human homeland somewhere in northeast Africa.

“Something remarkable happened in Australia 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, and it involved much more than the dingo,” Dr. Klein said.

The demonstration site for the Implicit Association

"When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year."

"But the reliance on the VLPFC doesn’t just lead us to fixate on our depressing situation; it also leads to an extremely analytical style of thinking. That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to “work” with all the information stuck in consciousness. When people rely on working memory — and it doesn’t matter if they’re doing long division or contemplating a relationship gone wrong — they tend to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down their complex problems into their simpler parts.

The bad news is that this deliberate thought process is slow, tiresome and prone to distraction; the prefrontal cortex soon grows exhausted and gives out. Andrews and Thomson see depression as a way of bolstering our feeble analytical skills, making it easier to pay continuous attention to a difficult dilemma. The downcast mood and activation of the VLPFC are part of a “coordinated system” that, Andrews and Thomson say, exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.”"

"Nisbett misrepresents much of the available information using highly selective reviews of the literature. Especially egregious are his many errors of omission."

"It seems common sense that a litter-strewn, graffiti-spattered environment will suffer more petty criminality than a pristine one. This is the nub of the broken windows theory espoused by James Wilson and George Kelling in 1982: disorder begets disorder. But, surprisingly, it has never been proven beyond reasonable doubt, because other factors such as policing levels have fogged the picture. Nonetheless, the concept has been whipped up into the idea of zero tolerance policing, in which the stamping out of minor infractions such as graffiti is believed to deter other criminality.

And so Kees Keizer and a team of behavioural scientists from the University of Groningen designed some experiments that could settle the matter, all to be conducted secretly on Dutch streets."

"Recent evidence that Druids possibly committed cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice—perhaps on a massive scale—add weight to ancient Roman accounts of Druidic savagery, archaeologists say."

"Hundreds of circles, squares, and other geometric shapes once hidden by forest hint at a previously unknown ancient society that flourished in the Amazon, a new study says. "