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> The unfortunate echoes of this slant towards eugenics are heard today in the names we use for many statistical concepts, such as: > Regression: What we c

> The unfortunate echoes of this slant towards eugenics are heard today in the names we use for many statistical concepts, such as: > Regression: What we call “linear regression” today was named for an observation that genes “regressed” to some average. It was a way of saying, “don’t mix with those people, or your children will regress and make society worse for it.” > Correlation: Literally from co-relation, or how related two “desirable” traits were in a population. You might guess which traits eugenicists thought made one desirable. This is another entry to go along with "The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against", isn't it? Science isn't making enough progress for people to differentiate themselves by their research, so we'll start throwing people out for not keeping up with intellectual fashions like the sociology professors do.

karmakurtisaani 5y ago
The quoted part must be some form of elaborate trolling. Or mental illness.
- ThatGeoGuy 5y ago
  While I'm not dang, I will ask that you refer to HN's guidelines if you want to criticize my writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In particular the first three rules: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
- melling 5y ago
  As far as I can tell, they are not from the book, which I just purchased
melling 5y ago
“The term "regression" was coined by Francis Galton in the 19th century to describe a biological phenomenon. The phenomenon was that the heights of descendants of tall ancestors tend to regress down towards a normal average (a phenomenon also known as regression toward the mean).[7][8] For Galton, regression had only this biological meaning” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_analysis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_analysis I bought the book and I’m not sure where those other quotes originated ““A few years after publishing his initial findings, he coined the more general term correlation (originally co-relation) to refer to the association of any two variables that tended to go together, such as a person’s height and their shoe size, and he provided a formula for correlation that would reproduce his “coefficient of reversion” from the heredity studies.” Excerpt From Bernoulli's Fallacy Aubrey Clayton https://books.apple.com/us/book/bernoullis-fallacy/id1538214239 https://books.apple.com/us/book/bernoullis-fallacy/id1538214... This material may be protected by copyright.

karmakurtisaani 5y ago

The quoted part must be some form of elaborate trolling. Or mental illness.

ThatGeoGuy 5y ago
While I'm not dang, I will ask that you refer to HN's guidelines if you want to criticize my writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In particular the first three rules: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
melling 5y ago
As far as I can tell, they are not from the book, which I just purchased

melling 5y ago

“The term "regression" was coined by Francis Galton in the 19th century to describe a biological phenomenon. The phenomenon was that the heights of descendants of tall ancestors tend to regress down towards a normal average (a phenomenon also known as regression toward the mean).[7][8] For Galton, regression had only this biological meaning” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_analysis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_analysis I bought the book and I’m not sure where those other quotes originated ““A few years after publishing his initial findings, he coined the more general term correlation (originally co-relation) to refer to the association of any two variables that tended to go together, such as a person’s height and their shoe size, and he provided a formula for correlation that would reproduce his “coefficient of reversion” from the heredity studies.” Excerpt From Bernoulli's Fallacy Aubrey Clayton https://books.apple.com/us/book/bernoullis-fallacy/id1538214239 https://books.apple.com/us/book/bernoullis-fallacy/id1538214... This material may be protected by copyright.