7 ms·

I would love to see these studies repeated, but asking whether the public believes different reliable, well-studied conclusions of science. For the most part, a

I would love to see these studies repeated, but asking whether the public believes different reliable, well-studied conclusions of science. For the most part, all these studies ask is whether people trust scientific results that contradict conservative ideology. But there are a variety of reliable scientific results that contradict other ideologies. What would happen if they were included? Examples: - Variance in female intelligence/math ability/other traits is smaller than for men, at roughly the rate Larry Summers famously speculated about. - Different races within the US have different intelligence levels, and that intelligence is highly predictive of adult outcomes. - Demand curves for labor are downward sloping. - In the nature vs nurture battle, nature won. - Teacher performance can be reliably evaluated with statistics (e.g. VAM). - There is no scientifically demonstrated benefit to organic food, and no harm from GMO.

Alex3917 10y ago
The problem is most of those aren't even true, e.g. c.f. my notes on VAM: http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-problems http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-prob... http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation Most of which are from the primary sources referenced in Diane Ravitch's book: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465036589/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465651203&sr=8-1&keywords=diane+ravitch+the+death+and+life+of+the+great+american+school+system https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp...
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Diane Ravitch, such an unbiased source. Lets assume the counterfactual - that teacher performance has no measurable effect. The logical conclusion is that since quality is irrelevant, we should focus on cost. I assume that you support this conclusion? Diane Ravitch certainly doesn't. The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high, that the effect of teachers fades over time, and that the effect of teachers is small. None of this implies VAM doesn't work. Many of your sources don't even agree with you. For instance, the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate! Some years back I recall we discussed this, and I suggested you go learn about the difference between variance and bias. Have you done this? Incidentally, you do bring up yet another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all.
  - Alex3917 10y ago
    > The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high There is a lot in there about bias also, that's what all the stuff about standardized tests not being on an interval scale is about. Gifted vs mainstream vs special ed students show wildly different rates of progress on standardized tests that's completely divorced from how much they're actually learning, which means that the scores of teachers are largely determined by which populations they're teaching. > None of this implies VAM doesn't work. High variance absolutely implies that VAM doesn't work. If you are firing good teachers at random then only morons would go into teaching, especially given the barrier to entry. > the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate! In this context, 74% accurate means 100% useless for the above reason. > another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all. I would say that most of the research using standardized tests to 'prove' that teachers matter is wrong, but that's not the same as proving that teachers don't matter. Any research purporting to 'prove' that teachers don't matter is going to be flawed for the same reason, because you can't reliably measure teacher quality by using tests meant to evaluate students.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      High variance absolutely implies that VAM doesn't work. If you are firing good teachers at random then only morons would go into teaching. So only a moron would trade stocks, speculate on real estate, or take a job as a salesman? Of course, we just agreed that even if this is true, it doesn't matter. Morons are nearly as good at teaching as anyone else, and the results of good teaching fades over time anyway. So what would be the harm? It's a simple fact of statistics - the bigger the effect size, the easier it is to measure. It's simply innumeracy to claim large effects sizes and also impossibility to measure them. Why all the left wing mathematics denialism? (Another example of left wing mathematics denialism applies to the pigeon hole principle. If you have N houses and K > N people, K - N people won't have a house.)
      - Alex3917 10y ago
        > So only a moron would trade stocks, speculate on real estate, or take a job as a salesman? All of those are examples of jobs with fairly to extremely reliable performance measurements... E.g. if a salesperson sells makes 20 sales in a quarter, then there is zero chance of them getting fired because their managers think they actually made -7 sales. > Morons are nearly as good at teaching as anyone else, and the results of good teaching fades over time anyway. Again, not accurate. The evidence that good teachers have some magical impact on student performance as measured by standardized test scores is flawed, but that doesn't have any relevance to the question of whether or not good/bad teachers exist in reality. And in fact, if you buy into the idea that "education isn't the filling of a vessel, but the lighting of a fire," then you'd expect the impact of good teachers to become larger over time. (But again, not as measured by VAM.)
- MustardTiger 10y ago
  Did you post the wrong links by mistake? Those don't contradict the science in question.
- jerf 10y ago
  As much fun as the long thread now dangling beneath your post is, it also misses the point. The point is that all of what yummyfajitas posted can be backed up with peer-reviewed reliable research. As for the fact that many, most, or even all of them can also be contradicted by reliable peer-reviewed research, well, it may win the battle but lose the war to argue that. If science can produce peer-reviewed contradictory research... and it most assuredly can, because that's basically by design and broadly a good thing... then on what basis do you attack the public for the preference it shows for one side or another of the peer-reviewed research? If I or the public in general agree with a position that only 30% of the "real scientists" in a field hold, am they "mistrusting science"? 10%? 5%? 1%? That's actually an interesting question, I think. I certainly don't have a great answer as to how to draw the line. At least one can make a confident declaration at 0%. But the easy answers beyond that don't work, because there isn't an obvious algorithm that says how to convert collections of scientific papers into truth. I myself have had some "big bets" out on major sciences being wrong for a while now, and at least one of them has metaphorically paid off; I've had a marker on "the dominant nutritional science of the day is majorly wrong" for about 13 years now. That would be the dominant nutritional science of the 1990s, with "excessive fat is the cause of obesity" being the primary claim, along with assorted other things. That the 1990s was wrong seems to be becoming the dominant position now at just about the maximum rate it can without anyone having to ever admit they were wrong. (Note that as a negation, I'm not claiming I did or do know what is the correct theory, just that the dominant one was wrong.) Was I "mistrusting science"? There were some scientists who led me in that direction, after all. If I was "mistrusting science", was that bad? Because it apparently wasn't very trustworthy anyhow. It is all-but-100% likely that some major fields of science today are just as wrong. What are they? I've got some thoughts but I can't prove them. The correct relationship between the public and science is a legitimately difficult problem. It is certainly tempting for establishment (of whatever the appropriate establishment is) scientists to just yell at the public for not believing this or that element of their establishment position, but we must balance this against the fact that we have a looooot of history of establishment scientists being wrong, with at times quite significant consequences. Blind trust would be misplaced. Informed trust is an awfully tall bar. It's a hard problem.
  - Alex3917 10y ago
api 10y ago
I'm not aware of any ideology where "doctrinaire" belief does not require some level of self imposed blindness. Here's a few more, and I'll be equal opportunity: - There is little evidence that free markets can drive serious innovation. Nearly all the high tech of the 20th century is a product of state research labs, state funding, or state enforced monopolies like Bell. This is true up to today e.g. Tesla and SpaceX are heavily state supported. - There is a ton of evidence that IQ and temperament are heritable and that parenting styles (excluding extreme abuse) don't matter that much. - Infinite exponential growth on a finite planet is impossible. Space migration may be possible but will not change this since e.g. Mars is too far from Earth and travel is too costly for fundamental physical reasons. Eventually supply side (ecological) or demand side (declining birth rates, diminishing marginal utility) will end the growth era. (Personally I think we are almost there as evidenced by near zero interest rates.) - The entire war on drugs is built on very bad science, or no science, and evidence from cases like Portugal's heroin decriminalization show that harm reduction works better even for hard drugs. - Most "alternative" medicine fares no better than placebo. ... and so on. Evidence is not why people believe things. For the most part, Ideologies (tm) are social/tribal membership signals not attempts to actually and honestly understand the world. Unfortunately we then proceed to reason from these shibboleths; to make decisions based on things that amount to little more than intellectual football t-shirts and special handshakes. For a very long time I've seen this as humanity's greatest weakness.
- sevenless 10y ago
  The "gender identity" thing is such an obvious case of ideology masquerading as fact.
  - api 10y ago
    Maybe, maybe not, or maybe both. The truth is probably something different from what either side wants to assert.
krastanov 10y ago
I know you are just giving examples, but it is fairly difficult for me to take you seriously when none of those examples are linked to a respectable reference.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  The first one: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/321/5888/494.summary http://science.sciencemag.org/content/321/5888/494.summary https://www.jstor.org/stable/2889145?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/2889145?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941 http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf (Note: you need to read data tables, not titles/abstracts.) Most of Alex's links support my claims about VAM - it's reliable, but not 100% perfect (some variance exists). The remainder are easily available via google, I'd copy/paste sources but I'm not on my personal laptop at the moment. Strangely, the original article didn't provide sources for it's claims. Why the isolated demand for rigor?
  - gone35 10y ago
    - Variance in female intelligence/math ability/other traits is smaller than for men, at roughly the rate Larry Summers famously speculated about. As to the first study (Hyde et al. 2008), your claim only holds for white 11th grade Minnesota students, and only in terms of standardized math scores. For Asian-Pacific Islander students, the M/F variance ratio (VR) at the 95%+ and 99%+ percentiles is 1.09 and 0.91 respectively. As to the fourth study (Kane and Mertz 2012), they don't report VRs for the upper tails of the distribution; they focus exclusively on grade school children; and they report that the overall VR varies widely from country to country, with a mean of 1.08. So again, your claim does not follow from their results. I haven't read the other two studies, but given the pattern so far, I don't think I'll need to.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      If you read all the studies, you'll generally find M/F variance ratio to be about 1.15. If you study sufficiently many subgroups you'll get a result which differs from this. But that's completely expected even if no subgroup differs at all. Here's some discussion of that issue in a completely different context: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/ab_testing_segments_and_goals.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/ab_testing_segments_... https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/slides/crunch_conf_2015/slides.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/slides/crunch_conf_2015/s...
naasking 10y ago
> Different races within the US have different intelligence levels, and that intelligence is highly predictive of adult outcomes I think tying this to race is a mistake. The data shows such correlations, but there are also correlations between race and socioeconomic status, and socioeconomic status and intelligence. The way you phrase this implies a premature conclusion about race when in reality it's likely not about race at all.
- rjsw 10y ago
  The results don't have to be really about race. I would expect that enslaving a particular group would have an effect on how their genes get mixed up over time compared to a control group of non-slaves.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    It's not a mistake to tie it to race. Race, or some hidden variable correlated to it, is highly predictive even after accounting for income and similar things. https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on-concentrated-poverty-and-its-effects-on-academic-outcomes/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on-c... http://ftp.iza.org/dp8733.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp8733.pdf http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/09/the_underperformance_problem/ http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/09/the_underperformance... Further, the effect size is large - far larger than anything you could hope to accomplish with a teacher. Supposing that the cause is genetic, I'm not sure how it's different if the genetic influences were caused by slavery or something prior to it. Either way, the net result is that an identifiable group of humans will have an intelligence distribution shifted to the left. Note that my claim had nothing to do with genetics - the genetic influences are trickier to pin down than the racial differences. Also, there is significant evidence that at least part of the black/asian gap is caused by factors other than racism and genetics - namely the overperformance (relative to black Americans) of black immigrants. http://www.unz.com/article/closing-the-black-white-iq-gap-debate-part-2/ http://www.unz.com/article/closing-the-black-white-iq-gap-de...
    - naasking 10y ago

Alex3917 10y ago

The problem is most of those aren't even true, e.g. c.f. my notes on VAM: http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-problems http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-prob... http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation Most of which are from the primary sources referenced in Diane Ravitch's book: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465036589/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465651203&sr=8-1&keywords=diane+ravitch+the+death+and+life+of+the+great+american+school+system https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp...

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Diane Ravitch, such an unbiased source. Lets assume the counterfactual - that teacher performance has no measurable effect. The logical conclusion is that since quality is irrelevant, we should focus on cost. I assume that you support this conclusion? Diane Ravitch certainly doesn't. The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high, that the effect of teachers fades over time, and that the effect of teachers is small. None of this implies VAM doesn't work. Many of your sources don't even agree with you. For instance, the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate! Some years back I recall we discussed this, and I suggested you go learn about the difference between variance and bias. Have you done this? Incidentally, you do bring up yet another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all.
- Alex3917 10y ago
  > The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high There is a lot in there about bias also, that's what all the stuff about standardized tests not being on an interval scale is about. Gifted vs mainstream vs special ed students show wildly different rates of progress on standardized tests that's completely divorced from how much they're actually learning, which means that the scores of teachers are largely determined by which populations they're teaching. > None of this implies VAM doesn't work. High variance absolutely implies that VAM doesn't work. If you are firing good teachers at random then only morons would go into teaching, especially given the barrier to entry. > the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate! In this context, 74% accurate means 100% useless for the above reason. > another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all. I would say that most of the research using standardized tests to 'prove' that teachers matter is wrong, but that's not the same as proving that teachers don't matter. Any research purporting to 'prove' that teachers don't matter is going to be flawed for the same reason, because you can't reliably measure teacher quality by using tests meant to evaluate students.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    High variance absolutely implies that VAM doesn't work. If you are firing good teachers at random then only morons would go into teaching. So only a moron would trade stocks, speculate on real estate, or take a job as a salesman? Of course, we just agreed that even if this is true, it doesn't matter. Morons are nearly as good at teaching as anyone else, and the results of good teaching fades over time anyway. So what would be the harm? It's a simple fact of statistics - the bigger the effect size, the easier it is to measure. It's simply innumeracy to claim large effects sizes and also impossibility to measure them. Why all the left wing mathematics denialism? (Another example of left wing mathematics denialism applies to the pigeon hole principle. If you have N houses and K > N people, K - N people won't have a house.)
    - Alex3917 10y ago
      > So only a moron would trade stocks, speculate on real estate, or take a job as a salesman? All of those are examples of jobs with fairly to extremely reliable performance measurements... E.g. if a salesperson sells makes 20 sales in a quarter, then there is zero chance of them getting fired because their managers think they actually made -7 sales. > Morons are nearly as good at teaching as anyone else, and the results of good teaching fades over time anyway. Again, not accurate. The evidence that good teachers have some magical impact on student performance as measured by standardized test scores is flawed, but that doesn't have any relevance to the question of whether or not good/bad teachers exist in reality. And in fact, if you buy into the idea that "education isn't the filling of a vessel, but the lighting of a fire," then you'd expect the impact of good teachers to become larger over time. (But again, not as measured by VAM.)
MustardTiger 10y ago
Did you post the wrong links by mistake? Those don't contradict the science in question.
jerf 10y ago
As much fun as the long thread now dangling beneath your post is, it also misses the point. The point is that all of what yummyfajitas posted can be backed up with peer-reviewed reliable research. As for the fact that many, most, or even all of them can also be contradicted by reliable peer-reviewed research, well, it may win the battle but lose the war to argue that. If science can produce peer-reviewed contradictory research... and it most assuredly can, because that's basically by design and broadly a good thing... then on what basis do you attack the public for the preference it shows for one side or another of the peer-reviewed research? If I or the public in general agree with a position that only 30% of the "real scientists" in a field hold, am they "mistrusting science"? 10%? 5%? 1%? That's actually an interesting question, I think. I certainly don't have a great answer as to how to draw the line. At least one can make a confident declaration at 0%. But the easy answers beyond that don't work, because there isn't an obvious algorithm that says how to convert collections of scientific papers into truth. I myself have had some "big bets" out on major sciences being wrong for a while now, and at least one of them has metaphorically paid off; I've had a marker on "the dominant nutritional science of the day is majorly wrong" for about 13 years now. That would be the dominant nutritional science of the 1990s, with "excessive fat is the cause of obesity" being the primary claim, along with assorted other things. That the 1990s was wrong seems to be becoming the dominant position now at just about the maximum rate it can without anyone having to ever admit they were wrong. (Note that as a negation, I'm not claiming I did or do know what is the correct theory, just that the dominant one was wrong.) Was I "mistrusting science"? There were some scientists who led me in that direction, after all. If I was "mistrusting science", was that bad? Because it apparently wasn't very trustworthy anyhow. It is all-but-100% likely that some major fields of science today are just as wrong. What are they? I've got some thoughts but I can't prove them. The correct relationship between the public and science is a legitimately difficult problem. It is certainly tempting for establishment (of whatever the appropriate establishment is) scientists to just yell at the public for not believing this or that element of their establishment position, but we must balance this against the fact that we have a looooot of history of establishment scientists being wrong, with at times quite significant consequences. Blind trust would be misplaced. Informed trust is an awfully tall bar. It's a hard problem.
- Alex3917 10y ago

api 10y ago

I'm not aware of any ideology where "doctrinaire" belief does not require some level of self imposed blindness. Here's a few more, and I'll be equal opportunity: - There is little evidence that free markets can drive serious innovation. Nearly all the high tech of the 20th century is a product of state research labs, state funding, or state enforced monopolies like Bell. This is true up to today e.g. Tesla and SpaceX are heavily state supported. - There is a ton of evidence that IQ and temperament are heritable and that parenting styles (excluding extreme abuse) don't matter that much. - Infinite exponential growth on a finite planet is impossible. Space migration may be possible but will not change this since e.g. Mars is too far from Earth and travel is too costly for fundamental physical reasons. Eventually supply side (ecological) or demand side (declining birth rates, diminishing marginal utility) will end the growth era. (Personally I think we are almost there as evidenced by near zero interest rates.) - The entire war on drugs is built on very bad science, or no science, and evidence from cases like Portugal's heroin decriminalization show that harm reduction works better even for hard drugs. - Most "alternative" medicine fares no better than placebo. ... and so on. Evidence is not why people believe things. For the most part, Ideologies (tm) are social/tribal membership signals not attempts to actually and honestly understand the world. Unfortunately we then proceed to reason from these shibboleths; to make decisions based on things that amount to little more than intellectual football t-shirts and special handshakes. For a very long time I've seen this as humanity's greatest weakness.

sevenless 10y ago
The "gender identity" thing is such an obvious case of ideology masquerading as fact.
- api 10y ago
  Maybe, maybe not, or maybe both. The truth is probably something different from what either side wants to assert.

krastanov 10y ago

I know you are just giving examples, but it is fairly difficult for me to take you seriously when none of those examples are linked to a respectable reference.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
The first one: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/321/5888/494.summary http://science.sciencemag.org/content/321/5888/494.summary https://www.jstor.org/stable/2889145?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/2889145?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941 http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf (Note: you need to read data tables, not titles/abstracts.) Most of Alex's links support my claims about VAM - it's reliable, but not 100% perfect (some variance exists). The remainder are easily available via google, I'd copy/paste sources but I'm not on my personal laptop at the moment. Strangely, the original article didn't provide sources for it's claims. Why the isolated demand for rigor?
- gone35 10y ago
  - Variance in female intelligence/math ability/other traits is smaller than for men, at roughly the rate Larry Summers famously speculated about. As to the first study (Hyde et al. 2008), your claim only holds for white 11th grade Minnesota students, and only in terms of standardized math scores. For Asian-Pacific Islander students, the M/F variance ratio (VR) at the 95%+ and 99%+ percentiles is 1.09 and 0.91 respectively. As to the fourth study (Kane and Mertz 2012), they don't report VRs for the upper tails of the distribution; they focus exclusively on grade school children; and they report that the overall VR varies widely from country to country, with a mean of 1.08. So again, your claim does not follow from their results. I haven't read the other two studies, but given the pattern so far, I don't think I'll need to.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    If you read all the studies, you'll generally find M/F variance ratio to be about 1.15. If you study sufficiently many subgroups you'll get a result which differs from this. But that's completely expected even if no subgroup differs at all. Here's some discussion of that issue in a completely different context: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/ab_testing_segments_and_goals.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/ab_testing_segments_... https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/slides/crunch_conf_2015/slides.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/slides/crunch_conf_2015/s...

naasking 10y ago

> Different races within the US have different intelligence levels, and that intelligence is highly predictive of adult outcomes I think tying this to race is a mistake. The data shows such correlations, but there are also correlations between race and socioeconomic status, and socioeconomic status and intelligence. The way you phrase this implies a premature conclusion about race when in reality it's likely not about race at all.

rjsw 10y ago
The results don't have to be really about race. I would expect that enslaving a particular group would have an effect on how their genes get mixed up over time compared to a control group of non-slaves.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  It's not a mistake to tie it to race. Race, or some hidden variable correlated to it, is highly predictive even after accounting for income and similar things. https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on-concentrated-poverty-and-its-effects-on-academic-outcomes/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on-c... http://ftp.iza.org/dp8733.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp8733.pdf http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/09/the_underperformance_problem/ http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/09/the_underperformance... Further, the effect size is large - far larger than anything you could hope to accomplish with a teacher. Supposing that the cause is genetic, I'm not sure how it's different if the genetic influences were caused by slavery or something prior to it. Either way, the net result is that an identifiable group of humans will have an intelligence distribution shifted to the left. Note that my claim had nothing to do with genetics - the genetic influences are trickier to pin down than the racial differences. Also, there is significant evidence that at least part of the black/asian gap is caused by factors other than racism and genetics - namely the overperformance (relative to black Americans) of black immigrants. http://www.unz.com/article/closing-the-black-white-iq-gap-debate-part-2/ http://www.unz.com/article/closing-the-black-white-iq-gap-de...
  - naasking 10y ago