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gjm comments on Open thread, 7-14 July 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: David_Gerard 07 July 2014 07:14AM

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Comment author: gjm 13 July 2014 07:27:50PM 2 points [-]

the exact calculation you want

You say that as if I'm asking for something specific and unusual, but all I'm actually doing is responding to "If you do the calculations you find X" with "That's interesting; have you done those calculations or seen someone else do them, then?".

Comment author: gwern 13 July 2014 11:03:28PM *  3 points [-]

The problem is, I want to see someone other than La Griffe do the numbers and I'm not happy relying on him.

I don't know who he is, I haven't gone through his derivations or math, I don't know how accurate his models are, he uses a lot of old sources of data like Project Talent (which may or may not be fine, but I don't have the domain expertise to know), and the one piece of writing of his I've really gone through, his 'smart fraction' doesn't seem to hold up too well using updated national IQ data from Lynn (me and Vaniver tried to reproduce his result & update it in some comments on LW).

But the problem is, given the conclusion, I am unlikely ever to see someone from across the ideological spectrum verify that his work is right. (Whatever the accuracy of his own arguments, La Griffe does a good job tearing apart one attempt to prove there is no variance difference, where the woman's arguments show she either doesn't understand the issue or is being dishonest.)

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 14 July 2014 10:17:53PM 1 point [-]

Your third link begins with the Griffe taking numbers from Janet Hyde, who is on the opposite end of the spectrum. The difference is that she downplays the magnitude of the standard deviation difference. Isn't the main concern the source of the numbers, not the calculation? It's just a normal distribution calculation.

(I don't actually believe that intelligence is normally distributed, so I don't believe the argument.)

Comment author: gwern 14 July 2014 11:58:16PM 1 point [-]

It's just a normal distribution calculation. (I don't actually believe that intelligence is normally distributed, so I don't believe the argument.)

If you don't think intelligence is normally distributed, isn't that a problem for how true his results are and why one might want third-parties' opinion? And I'm not sure that affects his rank-ordering argument very much; that seems like it might be reasonably insensitive to the exact distribution one might choose.

Comment author: gjm 14 July 2014 01:52:54PM 0 points [-]

OK, I understand. (I share your frustration, would count as "from across the ideological spectrum", and have at least a good subset of the necessary skills, but probably lack the time to try to rectify the deficit myself.)