Lecture 6

Feb 21

readings

• ch. 4 of Desrosières
• chapter 3 of Gould's Mismeasure of Man,
• excerpt from Galton's own writings, the "Typical Laws of Heredity"

Discussion

Priming as a tool for psychology studies

• Saying orange increases the probability of thinking the word orange

Strategies for evading p-value hacking

• Multiple nobel prize winners have been accused of p value hacking
• Prevent researchers from p-value hacking by requiring multiple measurements and proof of concept

19th Century Eugenicists

• Why were they trying to better then world through data
• The Enlightenment caused us to believe that reason applied to social problems is supposed to better society
• Used data to approach poverty

Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment Philosophers

Malthus vs Adam Smith

• Malthus believes that resources would not grow to fit the needs of population
• Smith won

Condorcet and Laplace

• Willingness to look critically
• Move from individually reasoning to aggregate description

Social mathematics transition to scientific racism

• Gould on Galton
• States can matter in understanding their people under administrative categories
• Statistical understanding of social problems
• Historical context in evolutionary biology

Pearson

• Was an anti-realist
• Correlation Coefficient based only on prior observed data, can't perform testable experiment

Gould

• Galton: Studied inheritance of intelligence
• Broca Craniometry: Measured heads and used as foundation for scientific racism

Analysis of Gould

• Potential take away could be that quantification doesn't matter

Galton

• Population according to their deviation
• Variance among the same family
• Law of Deviation describes variance among a population
• Support for policy, engineering statecraft
• In current time frame wasn't able to run tests such as "What if X people didn't smoke"
• Only had access to observational data
• Used Pearson's correlation coefficient