Report comment

The three groups were needed because such adoptions are an IQ raising factor in themselves.

They found that the whites did better on IQ test than the mixed race, who did better than the blacks. Some children were mislabeled as black when they were mixed race. They performed like the other mixed race children.

Report comment

To be sure, if blacks are worse employees for whatever reason, they will find it harder to find jobs. The one technique that South Africa found effective in keeping blacks from “whites only” jobs was to impose minimum wage standards.

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

You are right to point out that some of what he says is symmetric between fields, but I didn’t criticize that paragraph. But his criticism is predicated on a lack of symmetry. You deny the lack of symmetry (which I find utterly unconvincing). That’s the end of the argument. Maybe you should spell out how that disagreement propagates through the rest, but you should make it clear that it is the point of departure and not criticize his process of elaboration of the previous belief.

But why do you care about this meta stuff? Why does Steffan? It’s a disjointed essay and he doesn’t really say why. The best I can string together is that the field started out corrupt in one way and while that way has changed, it inherited other forms of corruption. In any event, why don’t we focus on the object level accusations of corruption?

The only interesting thing Steffan says is to criticize the sunglasses experiment not for being too artificial or narrow (which are serious problems, but endemic in psychology), but for being role-play. That is, maybe the subject knows what’s being tested and wants to confirm the experimenter’s theory. If so, the existence of a political echo chamber is relevant, though Steffan fails to make that connection. This is a standard criticism of the Zimbardo prison experiment and of stereotype threat. It’s also why deception is pretty common in psychology experiments, as in the faithfulness experiment you mentioned.

Report comment

Report comment

First, this is kind of like the nature-vs-nuture debate in that the construct we’re looking for depends on the inherent variability on both sides. Like, if there’s a huge amount of variability between competent and incompetent doctors, then firing the incompetent ones could work. On the other hand, if all doctors are basically equally good and they just make errors for reasons like tiredness, firing the ones who commit errors will just be random.

Second, the strategy could be difficult for one hospital versus all hospitals. If there is a limited pool of doctors, then Hospital A’s firing strategy just leads to the bad doctors getting employed at different hospitals – the distribution of medical errors changes, but the number stays constant. On the other hand, Hospital B’s policy actively reduces the overall number of errors without shunting them over to someone else.

Report comment

Report comment

Does that make the right-wing/progressive mapping seem more plausible?

Report comment