Took one for the team and made a histogram of the Elon social security data. Not sure why his data scientists are just giving him raw tables like that.
It’s also weird that they keep tweeting out these extremely strong claims without taking a few days to do some basic follow up work.

Here's my solution to teaching this kid probability 🧵 Let's just take his system of assigning probability at face value. What's the probability of getting a six when I roll a die?

Well either it happens or it doesn't happen. So, the chances of getting a 6 are 50%.

Nate Silver's latest book reads to me like a roadmap of the current moment. It's about a kind of chaotic, aggressive quantitative thinker who's usually wrong, but in calculated ways that lead to massive wins when things break their way. These would include venture capitalists, crypto bros, tech evangelists, AI boosters and even a few influencers. They also seem to be among the most powerful members of MAGA.

This is a resource thread about the Datasaurus Dozen data and how to get it.

The Datasaurus Dozen is a collection of extremely different datasets with near identical summary statistics.

It’s a reminder to all of us to ALWAYS plot our data. Here’s what all the datasets look like:

Nassim Taleb has written a devastatingly strong critique of IQ, but since he writes at such a technical level, his most powerful insights are being missed.

Let me explain just one of them. 🧵 Taleb raises an intriguing question: what if IQ isn't measuring intelligence at all, but instead merely detecting the many ways in which things can go wrong with a brain?

Here's something counterintuitive, that a lot of people don't understand about heritability as it relates to race, if skin color is heritable, and discrimination based on skin color is common, the bad outcomes due to racism is going to be heritable as well. Whenever you get any race-related heritability numbers, the first thing you absolutely should do is ask the person giving you those numbers what they did to rule these pathways out as a possibility.

hey now, this is the guy that said your tweet was racist. go yell at him not me.

https://twitter.com/gadsaad/status/1879297463128854732

Let me break this down. The original tweet is doing the statistical equivalent of this.

It feels racist because it’s a white nationalist framing of these data. This is a textbook example of how to lie with statistics. My main criticism is he didn't even provide a source. So, 100k+ people have seen this and we don't even know if there is any real data here.

According to a recent paper, the vast majority of academics gain their elite status the old-fashioned way, they were born with rich parents. Academics are more likely to have rich parents than teachers, lawyers and judges, and even physicians and surgeons.

Race and IQ research tends to be really bad. Here's why: To say IQ is "genetic" is to say it operates at the level of genes.

I have debunked this map of global IQs, and the study it was based on, so many times, but it just won't die. Help me spread the word about how much this study sucks. For every 10 likes, I will tweet a ridiculous fact about how badly this study was conducted.

https://twitter.com/lporiginalg/status/1867887347330621901

Real science is about paying close attention to the quality of your sources. Notice that the original poster doesn't bother to say where the data comes from.

It's actually incredibly bad that X downranks posts with links. It's perverse that supporting your claims with an external source makes it less likely people will see your post which is the exact opposite of what you'd ideally want in a truth-seeking forum. Sure you can put the link in the next post but very few people see the second post compared to the first. I also suspect that they downrank threads that have links in them just not as much when it's in the first post.

Here is a problem I see with modern liberalism: if you tell a certain kind of liberal that there are two kids drowning and that they can only save one, they would immediately declare that they can save them both, and then act completely surprised when both drown shortly after. If that same liberal could magically go back in time with all the knowledge of what had happened, that person would do the exact same thing again, and then be just as surprised when both kids drowned for the second time.

People are getting the wrong end of the stick here. Nobody stopped her from experimenting on herself. The hold up is on *publishing* the results.

https://twitter.com/IterIntellectus/status/1855245954460299391

Here's the quote from the article

I honestly get a lot of value out of ChatGPT. It feels built for people like me. I find identifying and correcting its mistakes pretty easy because I'm used to grading student assignments, but I also do things that minimize mistakes like: I input:
- examples of past solutions to similar problems
- a high-level sketch of the solution to the current problem
- background information if needed
- warnings about any potential complications or pitfalls

This Musk meme speaks to something true which is America is splitting culturally between the college educated vs the non-college educated.

There is however a third group. People who went to college but who think and act like people who didn’t. Basically you have these people who went to elite schools like Harvard or Stanford or Yale, who have law degrees and doctorates in many cases, telling the non-college educated that there’s no point to college because it’s not great job training.

there is clearly a force or mechanism that causes the US electorate to balance at precisely 50% democrat 50% republican no matter what either candidate says or does.

if i was a social scientist, i would be absolutely obsessed with this. my economics brain says maybe it's that each party is more extreme than the general electorate and is only willing to concede the minimum number of policies necessary to win which is exactly 50% + 1 vote.

this leads to a powerful finetuning mechanism on both sides.

For every ten likes, I'll post a new unhinged mathematician quote. if it's you or logical consistency, you know which one they're picking.

This common criticism of Nate Silver's methods represents a deep misunderstanding of statistical modeling. 🧵 We *should* be representing the outcome of the election as a probability because the outcome is *inherently* uncertain, and probabilities are how we communicate that scientifically.

One of the things I hate most about the cult of IQ is it leads to lot of magical thinking about how the brain works. There’s absolutely nothing shameful about relearning things you use to know. Research shows forgetting is a normal part of human cognition.

How to convince a skeptical colleague that you're right and they're wrong (thread) STEP 1: Show respect for their point of view by making a good faith effort to understand what they're doing and how it compares to your approach