Negative Correlation between Looks and Talent

Here is a good point about correlations:

The paper claims "Across the highest adult performance levels, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance." This is a classic example of Berkson's paradox.

Here is a simplified example to understand this: Assume that to be a successful actor you have to be either extremely good looking or extremely talented. Assume also that talent and looks are independent in the population. However, among sucessful actors you will observe a negative correlation between looks and talent. This doesn't meant anything beyond the selection process and should not be extrapolated.

My favorite example-joke of this is that basketball points scored is negatively associated with height among NBA players. (because to be an NBA player you have to be very tall OR be very good at scoring).

It refers to this AAAS Science paper, mirrored here. More discussion here.

The paper concerns comparing elite adult performance to elite youth performance. The top performing adults come from the top performing youths. But if you look at the correlation the wrong way, as in this paper, you might wrongly conclude the opposite.

Update: David Epstein brags about this paper as confirming his books on the subject. He makes the same statistical error.

Smart Babies are Slower to Walk

The most sensitive research topics are genes, race, and IQ. Anything relating all three is forbidden.

The London Telegraph reports:

Late-walking babies ‘may do better in school’

Genes that determine the age of taking first steps linked to educational achievement, suggests study

The study looked at age at onset of walking in over 70,000 infants of European ancestry.

This is respectable research because it avoided racial issues, but there is other research that some groups learn to walk sooner.

These studies just find correlations. They do not mean that a particular baby will be smart just because he walks late.

Why Are Black Crime Rates So High?

Ben Shapiro has a podcast on facts, and here is a recent episode:

29,322 views Apr 17, 2025 #BenShapiro #DailyWire #TheBenShapiroShow

In America, conversations about race and crime often follow a familiar script: white perpetrators, black victims, and a justice system accused of systemic bias. But what does the data actually say?

In this episode, Ben breaks down the numbers, traces the media’s influence and examines the role of fatherhood, policing, and culture in shaping crime patterns across racial groups.

so why is this 5:28 happening? why disproportionate crime in 5:30 the black community?

the single most 5:32 obvious factor correlating with violent 5:33 crime is lack of fathers in the home. 5:36 according to the Institute for Family 5:38 Studies only 37% of black children are 5:40 living in a home headed by their 5:42 biological parents. 72% of black fathers 5:44 have had a child out of wedlock. studies 5:46 show the number of fathers in a 5:47 neighborhood can actually help alleviate 5:49 the problem of lack of fathers directly 5:51 in the home.

Yes, that is an obvious correlation. Even among Whites, fatherlessness is correlated with violent crime.

This is a typical conservative response. They want it to be true, because then society can be improved by encouraging marriage and stable families. Those things are also good for other reasons.

The most obvious factor is the possibility that Blacks have genes for violent crime. There is not much research on this, as people are afraid of the results.

Ben would probably say that there is a lot of research showing that fatherlessness is correlated with violent crime, and that is true across all races, so why even look at race?

It is possible that fatherlessness does not cause crime at all. Maybe the crime is caused by genes, and those genes are inherited from the mom and dad. And maybe the moms and dads with those genes have all sorts of traits that lead to divorce and unstable relationships. So the genes could be causing the fatherlessness and the crime.

I am sure it is not that simple, and crime has many causes. I am all in favor of improving fatherlessness, but it may not help the crime rate much.

Currently we have many laws and policies that favor fatherlessness. I agree with fixing them.

The London Guardian reports on a hot controversy:

Migrant charities and MPs have accused Yvette Cooper of pandering to racism and stoking the possibility of riots after the Home Office said it would publish the nationalities of foreign criminals in the UK for the first time.

The home secretary has ordered officials to publish the data, including the crimes that have been committed, by the end of the year. It is expected to lead to “league tables” of foreign nationals showing which nationalities are more associated with particular crimes.

Many people do not want to face reality. Britain is being repopulated with foreigners, and some are much more criminal than others.

Apparently education is not the cause:

Indeed, some studies show that Black women are the most educated demographic in America. ...

Despite stereotypes about African Americans, Black Americans in the United States are among those most likely to earn a postsecondary degree. For example, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that from the academic years 2000–2001 to 2015–2016, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded to Black students increased by 75% and the number of associate degrees earned by Black students increased by 110%.2 Black students are making headway in graduate education as well, with, for example, the number of Black students enrolled in master's degree programs nearly doubling between 1996 and 2016.

Obstetricians are not Racist Baby Killers

In the aftermath of George Floyd, wokists desperately tried to find evidence of systematic racial discrimination. The most convincing example was a study showing Black babies die more often with White physicians.

Now it turns out that the study was fooled by a bogus correlation.

The Economist magazine reports:

“when Black newborns are cared for by Black physicians, the mortality penalty they suffer, as compared with White infants, is halved.”

This striking finding quickly captured national and international headlines, and generated nearly 700 Google Scholar citations. The study was widely interpreted—incorrectly, say the authors—as evidence that newborns should be matched to doctors of the same race, or that white doctors harboured racial animus against black babies. It even made it into the Supreme Court’s records as an argument in favour of affirmative action, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (mis)citing the findings. A supporting brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges and 45 other organisations mentioned the study as evidence that “For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.”

Now a new study seems to have debunked the finding, to much less fanfare.

Black babies do have lower birth weight, and the underweight babies survive less often, but it has nothing to do with the physician's race. The only relevance of the physican's race is that the most difficult cases are more likely to be referred to an expert specialist, who is more likely to be White.

Will the bogus paper and the 700 citations issue corrections? No. The US Supreme Court did not its incorrect citation. Wokesters will continue to claim this proves systemic discrimination.

I criticized Justice Jackson for saying:

"For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live."

I did not know the study was completely bogus, but I am suspicious of any study when (1) it draws causal conclusions from a correlation; (2) there is no control group; and (3) the policy recommendation matches the woke agenda.

Use common sense. Do you really think White physicians are killing Black babies? I resent these accuxations. It is outrageous that scientific, medical, legal, and political authorities go along with them.

Mother Jones Complains about Twitter Racism

I mentioned possible censorship of Elon Musk on X-Twitter, so I post a new Mother Jones complaint:

Elon Musk Is Spreading Centuries-Old Racist Pseudo-Science

0:00 I need you to see this Elon Musk is 0:01 spreading a very specific kind of racism 0:04 on the internet right now. ...

they can look at the chart and 1:49 there's a line you know there's a line 1:50 that says black Americans and says iq70 1:53 white Americans IQ 101 and people go 1:56 well that's it then this is the most 1:58 basic statistical error of the book you 2:00 know this a correlation doesn't equal 2:01 causation ...

2:27 so I think there's a couple of ways to 2:30 think about it one is this concept of 2:34 race fundamentally doesn't have a basis 2:38 in biology so you know as I mentioned 2:40 like the model. The evolutionary model 2:42 that we have of genetic diversity is 2:44 completely different from the sort of 2:46 social model that we have of distinct 2:49 isolated racial groups and so whenever 2:52 we start talking about racial 2:54 differences that is already a flawed 2:57 view of looking at genetic variation 3:00 which just does not follow those kinds 3:02 of hard uh and separate um racial 3:06 distinctions.

Got that? It is wrong because correlation does not imply causation, and the concept of race has no basis in biology anyway.

Parental Correlations Prove Nothing

SciAm reports:

Empathy can help people build strong friendships and close family ties. A new study reinforces the power of teaching and practicing empathy, especially during adolescence.

New results from a long-term study published in the journal Child Development found that teens who received “empathic care” from their mother (the only parent included in the study) were able to pay it forward and show empathy to their close friends. The research further suggests that parental empathy is passed down from generation to generation: teenagers who developed empathy skills were more likely to have healthy adult relationships and a supportive parenting style with their own children more than a decade later.

No, this does not show any value to empathy in parenting.

It just shows a correlation between mothers and children. Such correlations might be entirely explained by genes. There is no way a study like this can show that a parenting strategy is beneficial.

Woke is a Mental Illness

News:

A study out of Finland has found that people who believe in “woke” ideas of social justice are more likely to be anxious, miserable, and depressed.

The study, entitled “Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes,” was carried out by Oskari Lahtinen, a senior researcher at the INVEST Research Flagship Centre at the University of Turku. It sought to establish the prevalence of the “woke” worldview and the kinds of people who hold it.

This is an example of stereotypes being correct.

Woke people are concerned about bizarre stuff like George Floyd, pronouns, and Ukraine. They are detached from reality. These things have no bearing on their lives.

Transgender people are obviously mentally ill, but so are those who play along with their perversions, such as Pres. Biden.

The paper gives some wokeness definitions:

Theoretically, critical social justice propositions derive in part from various academic disciplines dealing with forms of oppression, for example, intersectional feminism and critical race theory (Bell, 1995; Crenshaw, 1990; Delgado & Stefancic, 2013). These disciplines derive a portion of their underlying epistemology from critical theory, postmodernism, and post-colonialism (Delgado & Stefancic, 2013; Mounk, 2023). A broader scope of relevant fields would also encompass, but not be limited to, black feminism, queer theory, and transgender studies (Butler, 1990; Collins, 2020; Combahee River Collective, 2014). Ideas deriving from these theoretical continuums come together in the perception component of critical social justice attitudes.

Previously esoteric ideas in the mentioned fields have made it into the mainstream recently, aided by best-selling authors (e.g., DiAngelo, 2018; Kendi, 2019). These disciplines point out varieties of oppression that cause privileged people (e.g., male, white, heterosexual, cisgender) to benefit over marginalized people (e.g., woman, black, gay, transgender). In critical race theory, some of the core tenets include that: (1) white supremacy and racism are omnipresent and “colorblind” policies are not enough to tackle them; (2) people of color have their own unique standpoint; and (3) races are social constructs (Delgado & Stefancic, 2013).

Queer theory on the other hand can be roughly summarized as a mechanism for problematizing boundaries of concepts and categories like “man,” “woman,” “straight,” “gay,” etc. (Butler, 1990; McCann & Monaghan, 2019). This process is called “queering,” and results, for example, in beliefs that there are no real boundaries between men and women and that gender, and possibly even sex, are social constructs. Queer theory and its offshoot transgender studies influence, and are influenced by, trans activism (McCann & Monaghan, 2019). They also often go hand in hand with current race activism: the critical race theory-influenced black identity movement Black Lives Matter (BLM), for instance, explicitly state their aims to include “to dismantle cisgender privilege” and “to foster a queer-affirming network”, even though BLM is best known for its activism against racist policing (Mathews & Jones, 2022).

Intersectionality thus ties together different kinds of oppression-related identity politics. Post-colonial theory derives from post-modernism and aims at opposing colonialism in all aspects of culture (Mishra & Hodge, 1991). Its most visible manifestations in contemporary culture have included, for example, attempts to “decolonize” university reading lists, that is, make them less white and European in favor of marginalized identities and attempts to get rid of statues of persons deemed controversial (e.g., slave-owning founding fathers in the US) and combating cultural appropriation (a privileged group adopting, e.g., traditions or dress from an oppressed group).

Believing all this entails life is inherently unfair and oppressive, based on skin color, microaggressions, and other trivialities. It denies your true identity and defines you by social expectations and the pronouns that others use.

Chetty Finds a lot of Meaningless Correlations

New lecture:

The Science of Economic Opportunity

Children’s chances of earning more than their parents have fallen from 90% to 50% over the past half century in America. How can we restore the American Dream of upward mobility for all children? In this talk, Raj Chetty, director of Opportunity Insights and professor of public economics at Harvard University, shows how big data from varied sources ranging from anonymized tax records to Facebook social network data is helping us uncover the science of economic opportunity. Among other topics, Chetty discusses how and why children’s chances of climbing the income ladder vary across neighborhoods, the drivers of racial disparities in economic mobility, and the role of social capital as a driver of upward mobility. He presents data on the state of economic opportunity in California in particular to provide a local context to these national patterns. Recorded on 10/25/2023.

This is highly regarded work, as if he is a shoo-in for a future Nobel Prize. (Ie, Bank of Sweden prize in Economics)

I am suspicious of his stuff. First, he and his team use datasets that no one else has, such as highly confidential IRS tax data. This means that other scholars cannot check their work.

His papers seems to be carefully cleansed of any objectionable conclusions. Worse, it appears that he had his conclusions before doing the research.

A lot of his papers seem to be reading causality conclusions into correlations. But correlation does not imply causation, and he never does any controlled experiments.

Drivers of economic mobility include innate IQ, innate behavioral traits, parental upbringing, schooling, wealth, etc. Chetty looks a lot at neighborhood characteristics that are almost certainly not causative. And he ignores factors like IQ that certainly are causative. I do not see any value in his work at all.

Suppose research told us that Black people live in Black neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods have lower economics opportunity. That would not tell us anything. But that isall Chetty's research is telling us.

Transgender People’s Neurological Needs

I mentioned that marriage is correlated with healthier and happier lives. The flip side of this is that transgenderism is correlated with an assortment of psychiatric and physical problems.

Scientific American magazine reports:

As a transgender neurologist, I advocate for the improved health care of other transgender people. I present my research findings to professional organizations and medical colleges throughout the U.S. While doing so, the most frequent criticism I receive from neurologists is: “What does being transgender have to do with neurology, the branch of medicine focused on the nervous system?” ...

Nevertheless, scientific research throughout the last decade has demonstrated that being transgender can have a lot to do with the health of the brain and the rest of the nervous system.

So what is the relation? Some transgender advocates say that the difficulties are caused by the stress of discrimination. But this is like saying that single people have shorter lives because of the stresses that society puts on singles. Possible, but unlikely.

My theory is that unhappy unhealthy people are more likely to become transgender, just as happy healthy people are more likely to get married.

In recent years, society has become much more accepting of transgenders, but it is not clear that it has made any transgenders better off. I suspect the opposite.

What Actually Makes People Happy

The Veritasium videos are very well produced and usually scientifically sound, but the latest, What Actually Makes People Happy, According to Science, was disappointing.

It cited research finding correlations between marriage, multiple personal relationships, happiness, longevity, and physical activity. They said that relationship and exercise cause happiness and long life. Money helps also.

My guess is that it is the other way around. Healthy happy people attract friends and spouses. The longer-lived people exercise more because they are healthy enough to do it.

No one wants to be around unhappy people. The unhappiness comes first, and then the relationships go bad.

The guests on the show seemed very scientific, except when they contradicted each other. And they really didn't have a scientific argument for causality

Supposed you picked 1000 people at random, and then randomly arranged for half to get married and the other half to get divorced or stay single. And then you did followup studies over 20 years to see which group was happier. This might give evidence for whether marriage causes happiness.

Nobody has done such a study, of course. But we can do studies of lottery winners. The winners are randomly made rich, and can be compared to a control group of losers. This might tell us if a monetary winfall leads to happiness. The video implied that it does not, but it was not clear. At one point it said that happy people can become even happier, with more money.

The video claimed that married men live 12 years longer than unmarried men, so marriage adds 12 years to a man's life. It is hard to believe that marriage could make so much difference. I think that women like to marry healthier men.

Why Rich Married People are Happier

Kevin Mims writes in Quillette:

In July, Sam Peltzman, an economist at the University of Chicago, published a study showing a strong connection between marriage and happiness. “Being married,” Peltzman wrote, “is the most important differentiator with a 30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap over the unmarried. … No subsequent population categorization [black vs. white, young vs. old, rich vs. poor, etc] will yield so large a difference in happiness across so many people.”

Many cultural commentators quickly picked up on this study and began urging Americans, especially young people, to focus more on finding a spouse than on finding a good career. In the New York Times, David Brooks wrote:

My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage. Please respect the truism that if you have a great career and a crappy marriage you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career you will be happy.

He goes on to agree, citing his happy marriage.

This sounds very strong, but I am unconvinced. Here is the study summary:

Since 1972 the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a representative sample of US adults “… [are] you …very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Overall, the population is reasonably happy even after a mild recent decline. I focus on differences along standard socio demographic dimensions: age, race, gender, education, marital status income and geography. I also explore political and social differences. Being married is the most important differentiator with a 30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap over the unmarried. Income is also important, but Easterlin’s (1974) paradox applies: the rich are much happier than the poor at any moment, but income growth doesn’t matter. Education and racial differences are also consequential, though the black-white gap has narrowed substantially. Geographic, gender and age differences have been relatively unimportant, though old-age unhappiness may be emerging. Conservatives are distinctly happier than liberals as are people who trust others or the Federal government. All above differences survive control for other differences.

It claims to control for differences, but of course there was no control group.

If marriage is correlated with happiness, then the obvious explanations are that marriage causes happiness, or that happiness causes marriage. The paper admits:

The usual caveats about causal inference should be kept in mind All of them – mutual and reverse causality, omitted variables, selection, etc. – apply to most every comparison you will see. For example, married people are happier than unmarried. Is that because marriage produces happiness or because unhappy people tend to be difficult to live with or because they sort out of the marriage market and on and on or all of the above? I leave such questions to others but show that the marriage gap is large enough to merit asking them.

So the study does not substantiate David Brooks' advice. Likewise, are the rich happier because they have more money, or did their happy outlook help them get rich?

Brooks is known for being very sloppy in citing social science data. Some consider him a charlatan.

There are also studies saying that married folks are healthier, longer-lived, richer, better-looking, etc. My guess is that the healthy happy rich people have a much better supply of mates to choose from, and hence more likely to get married.

Trying to Justify Racial Quotas

WSJ reports:

In a dissent from last week's ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of "diversity" in education. "It saves lives," she asserts. "For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live."…

The study makes no such claims.

This is a pretty crazy assertion. I don't know how "high-risk" is defined, but newborns usually survive. Nothing will double the survival rate.

Here is the error source:

The Association of American Medical Colleges (“AAMC”) is a non-profit educational association whose members include all 156 accredited U.S. medical schools; more than 400 teaching hospitals and health systems; and more than 70 academic societies.

On page 4 of the amicus brief:

And for high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug: it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live. (fn)Brad N. Greenwood et al., Physician-Patient Racial Concordance and

Pres. Biden appointed Jackson because she is a Black woman, and she is arguing for admitting students just because they are Black.

The actual study found a slight effect. Correlation is not causation. Maybe it is chance. Maybe the most difficult cases are passed to the most competent White obstetricians, so the most competent ones have worse fatality rates.

Apparently the medical schools are owned by the Left, or not competent to spot a phony statistical argument.

The College Fix reports:

Guests at the recent Berkshire Conference of Women Historians are expressing fury after one of the event’s venerable cofounders — an elderly white scholar — said she wished she had dark skin so her professional life had been easier, according to numerous tweets from professors in the audience. “Well, the Berks plenary just took a turn. A white senior scholar at the 50th anniversary plenary VERY publicly, and unapologetically, said that she wished she was Black so her professional life would be easier,” tweeted attendee Stephanie Narrow, a history PhD candidate at UC Irvine. “She was immediately called out for her blatantly racist remarks, and refused to apologize, let alone listen, to the reason why her remarks were horrifying[ly] wrong. ‘You won’t change my mind, I’m 84 years old,'” Narrow continued in her June 30 tweet thread. “The room is shaken, it’s palpable.”

They argued that her remark was "wrong" in the sense of being racist, inappropriate, upsetting, and uncomfortable, but not factually wrong. No could point to any difficulties faced by Black professors. The comment caused a fuss, and this pathetic apology:

The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians apologizes sincerely for the harm experienced at the 2023 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities. The very public racism witnessed ... The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians leadership condemns the racist, homophobic, and Islamophobic comments of one of the Big Berks conference co-founders, Lois Banner. We acknowledge harm and apologize to scholars of color ...

Banner’s comments and other micro-aggressions at the conference were particularly harmful as the Supreme Court of the United States announced its ruling to dismantle affirmative action in higher education that very day.

They are unable to give any example of harm. Obviously Banner is correct, or this apology would find something more substantial than a trivial micro-aggression.

Here is a YouTube debate on Is It Impossible For Feminism To Be Truly Inclusive? | Women & Non-Binary Debate | Cambridge Union. Listening is a waste of time. These women make little sense. No, feminism will never be truly inclusive. You cannot be promoting women's rights, equality, and the rights of non-women at the same time.

Update: The law firm has admitted the error:

That claim came from an amicus brief filed by lawyers representing an association of medical colleges. The brief stated that for "high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug; it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live," citing as support a 2020 study that examined mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015.

In a letter Friday filed to the Supreme Court docket, Norton Rose Fulbright wrote that the argument cited by Jackson in her opinion "warrants clarification" and sought to clear up any "confusion."

"The principal cited finding of the [study] was that the mortality rate for Black newborns, as compared to White newborns, decreased by more than half when under the supervision of Black physician," the law firm's letter said. "In absolute terms, this study found that patient-physician racial concordance led to a reduction in health inequity."

All the arguments for systemic racism and inequity are based on bogus statistics and anecdotes like this.

Genetic Influences on Intelligence

Emil Kirkegaard

A plethora of evidence for genetic influence of American race-ethnic gaps in intelligence ...

Intelligence tests are excellent predictors of school and job performance, and racial/ethnic differences in mean IQ are common. Based on five lines of evidence, Warne (2021) builds a case for partly genetic causes of differences in general intelligence (g) across American self/parental-identified race or ethnicity (SIRE).

All the groups show average differences. No surprise there. What is interesting is that is shows correlations between IQ and religion.

Okay, you are not going to get smarter by converting to a different religion. There are genetic factors at work, and you cannot do anything to change those.

The Trouble With Reparations for Redlining

Jason L. Riley writes in the WSJ:

. Research by economists William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo shows that between 1940 and 1980, homeownership rates climbed by 37 percentage points for blacks and by 34 points for whites. If homeownership builds wealth, this was a period of extraordinary gains for blacks.

But there is a more fundamental problem with linking reparations to past redlining policies. While a higher percentage of the black population lived in redlined areas, most residents of neighborhoods where the FHA refused to insure mortgages weren’t black, according to a 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research study by Price V. Fishback, Jessica LaVoice, Allison Shertzer and Randall Walsh. “In our sample, over 95 percent of black homeowners lived in the lowest-rated ‘D’ zones,” they found. “Yet, the vast majority (92 percent) of the total redlined home-owning population was white.” If being a victim of redlining is a qualification for reparations, what is the argument for excluding whites?

Regardless of this, it is pretty crezy to argue that Whites are somehow to blame for Blacks having low real estate values. It is just the opposite. Blacks drive down real estate values.

Redlining has been illegal for decades, but it turns out that using AI race-neutral objective algorithms gives similar results:

In the 1930s, Chicago was known for the discriminatory practice of “redlining,” in which the creditworthiness of properties was heavily determined by the racial demographics of a given neighborhood.

“There would be a giant map on the wall of all the districts in Chicago, and they would draw red lines through all of the districts that were primarily African American, and not give them loans,” she added.

“Fast forward a few decades later, and you are developing algorithms to determine the riskiness of different districts and individuals. And while you may not include the data point of someone’s race, it is implicitly picked up.”

The banks do not care about race. THey just their loans to be repaid.

Your Politics, written in your Face

PsyPost reports:

A new study in Denmark used machine learning techniques on photographs of faces of Danish politicians to predict whether their political ideology is left- or right-wing. The accuracy of predictions was 61%. Faces of right-wing politicians were more likely to have happy and less likely to have neutral facial expressions. Women with attractive faces were more likely to be right-wing, while women whose faces showed contempt were more likely to be left-wing. The study was published in Scientific Reports.

Wikipedia explains:

Physiognomy (from the Greek φύσις, 'physis', meaning "nature", and 'gnomon', meaning "judge" or "interpreter") is the practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance—especially the face. ...

Physiognomy as a practice meets the contemporary definition of pseudoscience[1][2][3] and it is so regarded among academic circles because of its unsupported claims; popular belief in the practice of physiognomy is nonetheless still widespread and modern advances in artificial intelligence have sparked renewed interest in the field of study. The practice was well-accepted by ancient Greek philosophers, but fell into disrepute in the Middle Ages while practised by vagabonds and mountebanks. ...

Due to its legacy of racism and junk science masquerading as criminology, the scientific study or even discussing the relationship between facial features and character have become taboo. However, science has uncovered many links between character and facial appearance.

One of the reasons AI is considered dangerous is face recognition. It does not just figure out your name and address. AI estimates your moral worth as a human being.

For a century, mainstream scientists have been able to tell everyone that physiogonomy is bogus. Now they will have to suppress AI.

Update: Yuval Noah Harari, the weirdo Israeli Sapiens author, says that AI could have identified him as gay before he knew himself.

All 3 Kids Identify as Queer

I never heard of this woman, but apparently she is a famous actress who has won an Oscar and other awards.

CNN reports:

Actress Marcia Gay Harden’s advocacy for LGTBQ community is motivated, she says, by they love she has her three of adult kids who all identify as queer.

During a recent “Drag Isn’t Dangerous” telethon, Harden called anti-drag policies “fear-based.”

“What’s happening right now is wrong,” Harden told the telethon’s host. “What drives me is my children are all queer. My eldest child is non-binary. My son is gay. My youngest is fluid. And you know, they are my kids and they teach me every day.”

Harden shares Hudson, 19, Julitta, 19, and Eulala, 24, with her ex-husband, Thaddaeus Scheel.

“It’s spreading that kind of fear and hatred among other people. I believe this country will fight that,” Harden continued.

“The Morning Show” star also advocated for the LGBTQ+ community in an Instagram post. “Gay is here to stay. Drag is here to stay. Donate what you can, and join us in spreading the love,” she wrote.

Maybe it is all a coincidence. Maybe if all parents were so open-minded, they too would get divorced and support their kids being queer.

She had two of her kids at age 45, so it is not clear whether she actually gave birth to them.

The Two-Parent Privilege

Economist Tyler Cowen writes:

A new and great book, authored by Melissa S. Kearney of the University of Maryland. The subtitle is How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, and here is one excerpt of the summary points:

Two-parent families are beneficial for children.
The class divide in marriage and family structure has exacerbated inequality and class gaps.
Places that have more two-parent families have higher rates of upward mobility.
Not talking about these facts is counterproductive.

The marshaled evidence is convincing, and I will be blogging more about this book. While some stiff competition is coming, this could be the most important economics and policy book of this year.

Maybe those conclusions are true, but I am skeptical about the evidence.

Correlation does not prove causation. Maybe the bad child outcome causes the parent divorce. Maybe inherited genes cause both.

Black and White Brains are Different

CNN reports on a new study of Black brains:

Researchers at Harvard University examined MRI scans of 7,350 White and 1,786 Black children ages 9 and 10. The data in the study was collected by the National Institutes of Health in 2019. ...

In the study, researchers found that Black children often developed behavioral problems later in life such as PTSD, anxiety and depression. These children also were susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse and suicide attempts and were likely to commit violence, the study said. ...

Harnett said his team began exploring a cognitive development study to dispel “this kind of folk belief that Black and White people have categorically different brains.”

But he found that the folk belief was true. From the study:

Relatedly, previous work outside the ABCD Study found lower neural reactivity to threat within the PFC, hippocampus, and amygdala in Black participants compared with White participants ...

Linear mixed-effects models revealed that Black and White children in the present sample differed in gray matter volumes in 11 of the 14 a priori regions of interest, after covarying for family relatedness, gender, age, and scanner type (Figure 1; Table 2). (An alternative visualization of the results is provided in Figure S1 in the online supplement.) White children showed greater gray matter volumes compared with Black children in the amygdala, hippocampus, frontal pole, superior frontal gyrus, rostral anterior cingulate, pars opercularis, pars orbitalis, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, caudal middle frontal gyrus, and caudal anterior cingulate and smaller gray matter volume compared with Black children in the pars triangularis (all p values <0.001).

The study was not able to find a cause for these differences. It could have been entirely genetic. They did note:

Researchers said Black children are much more likely to be exposed to violence, live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and combat systemic racism daily than White children. They also are exposed to those factors at an earlier age, the study said.

The most recent US Census data shows that Black families have a lower median income, higher rates of unemployment and poverty, and lower rates of educational achievement compared to White families, the study notes.

The obvious conclusion is that Blacks have genes causing structural differences in the brain, and as a result their communities have more violence, less income, and less education.

The Harvard researchers do not say this, of course. They make no attempt to rule it out either. They have no control group, or any way to say whether low income is causing brain scan differences, or brain differences are causing low income. Or gene differences are causing both.

It is hard to see how income could be a causal factor. Black Americans live better than most of the world, and better than Whites of a couple of generations ago. Do all those people have brain irregularities just because of lower income? Obviously not, or researchers would have discovered it.

If Blacks have brains that particularly prone to violence, and society punishes violent criminals, is that systemic racism? I think the Harvard researchers would say yes to that.

Don't blame me if this subject is offensive. I am just the messenger. It would be great if we could just treat Blacks better and they would have normal brains. This Harvard study says otherwise.

New Studies on the Transgenderism Fad

There has been a huge increase in child transgenderism in the past few years. Is it a big fad? Is it because a previously unrecognized illness is being treated? Is it a contagious disease?

NBC News reports:

The “social contagion” theory can be traced back to a 2018 paper published in the journal PLOS One. Dr. Lisa Littman, who at the time was a professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” which she described as adolescents experiencing a conflict between their birth sex and gender identity “suddenly during or after puberty.” These adolescents, she wrote, “would not have met the criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood” and are experiencing dysphoria due to social influence.  

Littman also hypothesized that adolescents assigned female at birth are more likely to be affected by social contagion and, as a result, are overrepresented in groups of adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria when compared to those who were assigned male at birth.

After intense debate and criticism, PLOS One conducted a post-publication reassessment of the article, and issued a correction that included changing the headline to clarify that Littman did not survey transgender or gender-diverse youth themselves, but actually surveyed their parents. The correction also noted that, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is not a formal mental health diagnosis at this time.”

Now a new study, by some prominent transgenderism advocates, claims to refute this.

The deleterious effect of unfounded hypotheses stigmatizing TGD [transgender and gender diverse] youth, particularly the ROGD hypothesis, cannot be overstated, especially in current and longstanding public policy debates. Indeed, the notion of ROGD [rapid-onset gender dysphoria] has been used by legislators to prohibit TGD youth from accessing gender-affirming medical care, despite the considerable methodological limitations underlying the generation of this hypothesis, as well as the unequivocal support for gender-affirming medical care by multiple major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association.8

Cannot be overstated? The bias shows. The study shows no such deleterious effect.

Their main argument is that females would be more subject to social contagion, but his study found more males.

They also say that the transgender kids reported bullying, while that would not be expected if the kids were doing what is popular.

This is not a refutation of anything. Maybe boys and girls have different reasons for being transgender. Maybe transgenderism is popular with some but not others.

It says other studies found bullying, but I do not see that the data prove anything. Suppose you discovered that kids with tattoos report more bullying. Would that prove that there is no social pressure to get tattoos? Certainly not.

This whole subject is politicized. A good paper is forcibly corrected. Stupid papers get published if they promote transgenderism. The major medical associations are on board with it.

Here is a criticism of an earlier paper by the same authors.

You know they have biases when you use phrases like "those assigned male sex at birth (AMAB)". They have male sex from the moment of conception until they die. They are male. The sex is noticed at birth, but also before birth and after birth.

There is no solid science backing up any of the transgender affirming treatments.

Researchers Ignore what is Abhorrent

Researchers often just look for what they want to see. Social science researchers often exclude possibilities that seem philosophically objectionable. Here is an example.

Julia Galef said:

I wanted to tell you when you were talking about how common it is in a lot of social science research to just ignore the alternate hypothesis that genes are causing the correlation, as opposed to the parenting causing the outcomes... It reminded me very much of my experience reading through a lot of the research on — as I was researching for my book — the research on how self perception affects your success.

Julia: Because there's all these studies looking at how people's self image affects their success at various things. And the conclusion is always: “You should have a positive self image, because people with positive self images tend to be more successful.”

And either it's just not acknowledged that a possible alternate explanation is that people with positive self images are more likely to actually have positive traits that help them succeed... Either that's not acknowledged, or occasionally it is acknowledged, and just dismissed out of hand as, “Well, of course not.”

I remember this one paper where they were reporting these results, and then there was a footnote where it said “Some people might object that people with positive self image have greater inherent talent than people without. But we can dismiss that, as it is obviously abhorrent.”

Wow. If you discover that success is correlated with positive self-image, then the obvious explanation to test is that the success causes the positive self-image, and failure causes negative self-image. But the reseearcher refused to even consider the possibility!

I don't even see why it would be abhorrent. It seems good and natural that success would improve self-image. Don't we want to succeed in order to improve ourselves?

I can only guess that there is some leftist repulsion of some people doing something to make themselves better than others. But the reverse causality seems abhorrent to me.

Michael Shermer writes:

Scientific American Goes Woke

A case study in how identity politics poisons science

In April of 2001 I began my monthly Skeptic column at Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the country dating back to 1845.

He goes on to explain how the magazine became leftist and unscientific, and rejected his columns with comments like these:

But we’re unwilling to publish a piece that suggests — even in a quote attributed to someone else [Carol Tavris] — that sexual harassment and the phenomenon of abused children growing up to be abusers are less of a problem than most people imagine. ...

You say, essentially, that things are better, especially for minorities of various kinds, than ever in history, your evidence being, basically, “you can look it up.” It may be true ...

Driving while black” is still a thing, as is getting shot by cops ... And worldwide, fascist and authoritarian regimes are on the increase.

In essence, you cannot report facts if they counter exaggerated stories that usefully promote a leftist narrative.

Here is a NY Times article complaining about scientists collecting data:

In 1981, when scientists in Hungary sampled the blood of Roma people incarcerated in Hungarian prisons, they classified prisoners as Romani based solely on their appearance, which the authors of the new paper argue is unscientific.

In 1993, another group sampling Romani DNA concluded that there were three distinct ethnic groups in the country, drawing a line between “the genuine Hungarian ethnical groups” and “Jews” and “Gypsies” — a research premise the authors of the new paper argue was racist.

Any data collected inevitably draws attention to differences between ethnic groups.