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Apprentice comments on The Effectiveness of Developing World Aid - Less Wrong
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Comments (51)
Apprentice:
That article you linked to is horrendously bad. This guy starts talking about multiple lines of evidence for the hereditarian hypothesis, cites a prominent paper surveying these lines, and then proclaims that the best and most decisive evidence is provided by the regression-to-the-mean phenomena. Which is in reality one gigantic logical fallacy, and quite possibly the weakest and most flawed argument ever set forth by Jensen and other prominent hereditarians. He then proceeds to spin his misunderstanding of this already catastrophically bad argument into an even more elaborate web of fallacies.
If you're interested in this topic, here are some links to recent LW discussions where you'll find a bunch of much better references. The first one specifically deals with regression to the mean:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2nz/less_wrong_open_thread_september_2010/2jpi http://lesswrong.com/lw/2eu/open_thread_july_2010/28v5
Thank you, I will take a look at those discussions. I'm not an expert on this topic by any means and can't claim to have developed an independent opinion of this regression-to-the-mean argument. A major reason this looked to me like a convenient article to link to was that it has a collection of links to recent articles by Jensen, Nisbett etc.