IIRC, having an index finger longer than your ring finger is a sign of having had high testosterone in the womb. I remember this mainly because my hands don't match.
It's even worse because it's the *ratio* of index finger: ring finger that signifies - something. I can't work out what, because the search entries all return trashy articles and the scientific papers don't say very much.
So lower ratio is more masculine/higher ratio is more feminine, but that is about all they agree on. If I measure my hands, I just about fall into the feminine range (oh, what a relief):
"From a study of 136 males and 137 females at the University of Alberta:
Males: mean 0.947, standard deviation 0.029
Females: mean 0.965, standard deviation 0.026
Assuming a normal distribution, the above lead to 95% prediction intervals for 2D:4D ratio of 0.889–1.005 for males and 0.913–1.017 for females.
From a 2018 study on a final sample of 249 graduate and undergraduate students from Warwick University, proportionally balanced by gender:
Males: mean 0.951, standard deviation 0.035
Females: mean 0.968, standard deviation 0.028"
I have a 'male' non-dominant left hand and a 'female' dominant right-hand, what does this mean? Probably nothing.
Am I reading this right? Is this saying that a ring finger longer than the index finger is the norm for both sexes? And the reverse, or equal lengths, would be hyper-feminine? Because that's what I've got, and I'm male.
Oh, it's a pain to try and figure it out. What I extracted from the mess of papers and horrible pop journalism articles:
(1) Most people tend to have the ring (4D) finger longer than their index (2D) finger
(2) Men tend to have longer ring fingers, because they have bigger hands than women
(3) Women tend to have index fingers only slighter longer than their index fingers
(4) So - to do a very exaggerated example - if you have an index finger (2D) that measures 88 mm and a ring finger (4D) that measures 90 m, your 2D:4D ratio will be 88/90 = 0.98. This is a high 2D:4D ratio and means you are a girly girl.
If your index finger is 88 mm and your ring finger is 106 mm, your ratio will be 88/106 = 0.83. Congratulations, you have a low 2D:4D ratio and are indeed a man.
So what if you are a woman with big fingers or a man with small hands? Could be down to testosterone exposure in the womb. Or something else. What does that mean? Here come all the dreadful pop journalism articles about you're gay, etc. The science papers say "kinda works for women, no correlation with gay men". Basically, it's about as good at forecasting real conditions as the popular Asian "if your bloodtype is this, you are that".
It's very easy! Just divide your significance threshold by the number of tests you perform and only exclaim "significant!" if the p-value is below that level.
Is that right? Suppose I got p = 0.049 on one test - that would pass the threshold. But suppose I did ten tests and got p = 0.049 on all of them. Realistically that is much more evidence - it's basically equivalent to getting a positive experiment and replicating it nine times. But it sounds like using your method, none of the tests would pass the threshold, and I would have to claim I got no evidence from any of them.
If you just do Bonferroni you wouldn't "get anything", but Bonferroni is the most conservative way to control for multiple comparisons. If your tests are all very correlated, or are such that the results should be correlated (as you seem to imply), Bonferroni is a very bad way to control for experimentwise error.
Shouldn't there be a sort of expected value calculation where you compare the number of false positives you expect to get with random data and X number of comparisons with the number you actually got? Andrew Gelman always complains that statistical significance adds "noise" due to the difference between significant & insignificant itself being insignificant, and Scott's hypothetical shows how that gets compounded here.
Some more thoughts on this: a smaller sample size makes it more difficult to obtain statistical significance. With this correction, it's treating your actual sample size like a smaller sample size. So for any sample size, there is presumably some number of questions that would make it nigh impossible to get statistical significance. I guess that would be related to "the curse of dimensionality". I'd guess it would also relate to doing between-subject studies and within-subject studies.
If I recall, it does actually give the right answer if all the tests are independent. It's a reasonable idea for this kind of situation, when you're just kind of looking at a set of things
With Bonferroni I believe you'd want to divide by the number of tests, not just the number of significant tests.
And yes, in the situation you describe (10 tests with p = .049) it does create the seemingly paradoxical outcome where you end up with no significant results post-correction, whereas you would if you'd only run one test. But that's exactly the point of Bonferroni: you want a more stringent alpha if you're testing more hypotheses.
Does HB have a way of handling ties, as there are in the example here? There doesn't seem to be a way to resolve which result is most significant. Usually this is a probability zero situation, but p-values from exact tests, for instance, don't have a continuous distribution, so it's not an impossible situation necessarily. Though I do admit it's a navel-gazey question for sure.
I don't think so. It's a fair question since HB requires ranking your results, so I'm not sure how that's usually dealt with.
The whole idea of multiple comparisons corrections gets messy pretty quickly once you start peeking beneath the surface. Personally I think the general spirit of the thing is still quite reasonable, but there are lots of practical cases where it's hard to figure out what the least wrong thing to do is.
Bonferoni is an *extremely* stringent threshold. Check out Benjamin-Hochberg for a much more practical adjustment procedure. B-H lets you set a false discovery rate that you're comfortable with.
The phrase you are looking for is "hierarchical modeling."
The hierarchy is from general to specific. If you do 10 related tests and get .049 on all of them, that is strong evidence for a vague hypothesis that encompasses all of them, but weak evidence for any of the specific formulations.
One thing that you can do is combine the four questions into a single authoritarianism scale. Take z scores of each of the four questions, rescaling each one so they all have the same mean (0) and standard deviation (1) with higher numbers corresponding to the more authoritarian option. (Or maybe treat them as 3 questions, since two of them came from the same survey question.) Then add or average them together so that each person gets a single score on your authoritarianism scale.
Then you don't have to worry about multiple comparisons since there's just one scale, and by averaging a few questions together into a single scale you can get less noise relative to the signal in your measure of how authoritarian people are.
If your null is a point hypothesis, then the p-value is uniformly distributed on [0,1]. If your experiments are independent (does not matter whether it's multiple experiments for the same question or different ones), then if all the nulls hold, the tuple of p-values you get is an iid sample from uniform. Thus you can do a statistical test to see if at least one hull is violated by seeing how likely such an extreme tuple or an even more extreme one is under the "iid from uniform" sampling. One way is to look at the minimum. The probability that the minimum is below some threshold t is 1-(1-t)^n<nt, so if the smallest of your p-values is below 0.05/n then either one of the nulls is false, or an event with probability less than 0.05 has happened. This is usually considered "statistically significant evidence" that one of the nulls is false. Technically, it does not tell you which one, but oh well. Note that this replicates the Bonferoni correction. One drawback is what you are describing -- I do 20 experiments and get p=0.1 in each one of them. This does not look like 20 samples from uniform, but my min-based test fails to reject. This is a failure of the test. But failing to reject is not a confirmation! One could do a different test, not based on the minimum. You could look at the sum (apparently sum of uniforms is called Irwin-Hall), or at the product (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_distribution#Uniformly_distributed_independent_random_variables). Either of these will reject the "all nulls" null in your case (again, without telling you which one). For the sum, and the example of twenty results of p=0.1 the Irwin-Hall gives the "combined p-value" on the order of 2^20/20! aka 10^-13, in accord with the intuition that getting 1-in-10 lucky 20 times in a row is unlikely. In your case of n=4 and p = (0.049, 0.008, 0.48, 0.052), the sum is 0.589, and the n=4 Irwin-Hall CDF at x=0.589 is (0.589)^4/4!=0.005. So if all the nulls held you have just witnessed a 1/200-probability event. Usually, we reject the "joint null" at this point.
Despite some confusion at the Wiki link, the product is actually even easier: "-ln uniform" is exponential, so the sum is a gamma distribution. We have -ln(0.049*0.008*0.48*0.052)=11.5, and from the CDF of our gamma distribution, the "combined p-value" from this test is (1-gamma(4,11.5)/6) which Wolfram tells me is about 0.00336425. So, even better, 1/300 unlikely. (For the fake "20 times of 0.1" example I get 5.6x10^-6, a bit less extreme than before, but still quite small; it is of course possible I have made some mistakes).
Note that Bonferroni and some other methods do not assume independence of the p-values, whereas, as I said, these homemade tests in my comments do. It is not very clear to me how strong this independence assumption is. It seems that various "standard" methods try to avoid it (or at least allow only non-negative dependence; I don't know if the "sum" or "product" tests generalize to the non-negatively dependent p-values).
Bonferroni correction would just mean the standard for significance is just e.g. 0.0125 rather than 0.05, right? One of the tests passes that threshold, so we can still say Scott found something. In general though I would only expect a multiple comparisons correction if the tests that achieved a lower p-value were preferentially reported (e.g. in a searchlight-type study).
no, you have to halve it again to 0.00625 because it's a two-tailed test. (i.e. there are 8 hypotheses: ambidextrous people are trumpier; ambidextrous people are less trumpy; ambidextrous people are pro-immigration; ambidextrous people are anti-immigration...)
Well, that depends on whether Scott did a two-tailed test to begin with, no? E.g. if it's a two-tailed test with reported p=0.008, it would have reached p=0.004 if it were one-tailed, so I think that halving is already built-in. I'm not an expert on this though.
He reached the opposite conclusion of the original study though, so doesn't that mean he must have been looking at both tails if he was originally trying to replicate it?
Yes, that's what I'm saying. A two-tailed test is essentially a mini-Bonferroni correction - it's equivalent to doing a left-tailed test and a right-tailed test, taking the smaller of the two p-values, and multiplying that by 2. If he had done 2 one-tailed tests, he would have gotten p=0.004, which would not take the multiple comparisons into account.
Statistically speaking, most people run two tailed tests even when they're only really expecting a result one way. Scott probably did too (ideally, he'd have reported what he did). This is due to conventions in the field and defaults in software packages. You get weird looks running one-tailed tests even if you honest to God were only expecting a difference in one direction.
Also put my vote in for FDR/Benjamini-Hochberg. tho it works out the same in this case. One result is significant and three are not.
That one is worth writing about, because it's significant even after multiple comparisons
I would not recommend Bonferroni: it abates the power of the test so much that it makes it completely uninformative. Benjamini-Hochberg can guarantee a very reasonable alpha with minimal loss of power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_discovery_rate
The wonderful thing about Bayesian analysis is that you, the commenter, can do it all on your lonesome. Work out your priors, crunch some numbers, and take this new info into account. Or, just use your intuitive ideas of how to change your mind based on new evidence, which of course runs on bayesian analysis anyway. Of course, you'll just be doing a similar thing to the whole bottom half of the post, because the frequentist statistics are just to get an idea of how strongly to weigh the evidence (a dataset like this is hard to analyze otherwise).
Of course I could do it myself, the point is why does Scott do highly misleading frequentist analysis instead? It is nearly impossible to correctly interpret p statistics is low-statistics situations; in particular, p<0.05 does NOT mean that the probability is 95% that the effect is real, but that's what almost everyone implicitly assumes (even people who know better).
Scott looked at many hypothesis, so even if they were all false, there's some chance that one shows the p-value we like. And that's why people up and down this comment are talking about methods that make the p threshold get lower as you look at more hypothesis.
To me, nothing about all that makes any sense, but I haven't thought about this deeply. Like, look at all the hypothesis you want as long as you don't cherry-pick the data. Now, interpret the results correctly. If you are testing whether aliens live in our toilets and feed on love and get a significant result with p=0.01, well... what were your prior chances of that being true? 1:1,000,000,000. Okay, now they are around 1:10,000,000. Big deal
I know, I know, when you choose the hypothesis based on the data, you are sorta choosing the data points: how many experiments did you *not* use to update the alien hypothesis because it didn't stand out?
Still, I get the impression this is being too nitpicky and not remotely the core of our problems. It would all be much better if the conclusions of papers were: "THIS hypothesis, ridiculous as it sounds, got a 20 log-odds update up; and THIS one, which sounded so plausible to us, fell 10 log-odds from your priors. The full data is available here for anyone to analyse and aggregate. See ya!". Then, serious review papers should look at the raw data of all studies where the hypotheses can be tested and not only those that wrote about it in their conclusions. Or maybe, papers could also present their assumptions, causal networks, priors.
But this p thing doesn't make much sense to me. "Ok, we claim we got a positive test for something with a false positive rate of 4%! Therefore, report it in the newspapers (especially if it's a surprising finding, i.e., something ridiculous with a low prior and/or important for the world at large!)"
But it's pretty good as evidence that the original hypothesis (the one he was inspired by) is either not true, not powerful, or needs drastic reinterpretation.
A p-value is the probability of obtaining a test statistic at least that large, assuming the null hypothesis.
This relies on the concept of a sampling distribution, which is the distribution of test statistics you'd get under the null hypothesis (e.g., for a two-sample t-test, where the true difference in population means is 0), based on the degrees of freedom (#observations, roughly). So once you obtain your actual test statistic, you ask: how likely is this test statistic to have come from that sampling distribution?
This is not the same as the probability of the null hypothesis being true, i.e., p(H0), and it's also not the inverse probability of the alternative hypothesis, i.,e., p(H1).
It means that if EXACTLY that experiment were done multiple times (without combining the data sets), then the looked-for effect would have been seen in 95% of them. But to translate this to a probability that the effect is "really there" requires a prior. Frequentists HATE priors, and so refuse to do it. However, no one really cares about that particular experiment, what we really care about is if the effect is "real". So even frequentists make the illegal mental shift to thinking that the 95% applies to the reality of the effect, which is wrong. In high-statistics situations, it's not VERY wrong, only a little bit wrong. But in low-statistics situations the prior becomes ever more important. There is always an implicit prior that corresponds to the illegal mental leap, but sometimes this is a deeply weird prior that no one would pick.
... which is exactly why p-values etc. are pretty a pretty useful starting point for Bayesian updating. I know we like to bash them because people misinterpret them, but that doesn't mean they're useless.
A P-value is pretty decent estimate of how much less likely the evidence is in a world where the null hypothesis is true. This is exactly p(evidence|model), which you can then translate to p(model|evidence) with your priors. Just Bayesian calculations dress it up a little differently and call it "likelihoods".
It means, if the effect is NOT real, you could maybe still see similar results about 5% of the time (if p=0.05). So if you test stuff that's obviously false enough times (or look at many different obviously false hypothesis) you'll still get "statistically significant" crap results.
Say you get some random coin from your pocket, and for some paranoid reason suspect that it's loaded to aalways fall on heads when flipped. And you test that by flipping it.
If it comes heads, that's a positive result (because it's more likely to happen if the coin is loaded (100%) than if it's not (50%)). However, if it's not loaded (as it obviously isn't, you are just paranoid), you had 50% chances of seeing that. So, p=0.5.
Flip it again. Another heads. Same analysis. Now p=0.25. Flip 5 heads in a row and, p=0.03! You're ready to publish your idiocy in a paper.
(But that's at least better than flipping it 5 times, getting heads-tails-tails-tails-heads, and publishing that the coin is rigged to flip that exact sequence. )
That paper explains very clearly why Bayesian analysis is ALWAYS better, INCLUDING in the multiple-outcomes situation (which is simply inherently more complicated).
I was disappointed by Section 5, telling me basically twice that it's too complicated with multiple outcomes. Unsure what you mean by very clearly in Section 5.
Here's something promising, looking at multiple binary outcomes/adverse events in a cancer study in a Bayes way
Did any of the studies get subjects to do dexterity tasks with their left vs right hands or did they just ask them whether they're ambidextrous? Maybe all the ambidextrous liberals never figured out that they're ambidextrous.
It seems like they asked a number of questions about which hand they use for particular tasks. I agree, it seems plausible that among ambidexterous people, those who generally think of themselves as conventional persons are more likely to answer that they use their right hand, and also give more conventional answers to other questions.
Perhaps this is a dumb question, but doesn’t ambidexterity usually mean someone is innately left-handed but was encouraged to use the right hand for some tasks?
Not in my experience. I've always switched hands. I predominantly use my right-hand because...school, society...but can switch without thinking about it for most tasks except writing. If my right hand is injured, I can get up to speed with my left for writing tasks in less than an hour. Learning sports was challenging because some days I feel more right or left handed than others, and coaches find that confusing. When playing handed sports like badminton, I switch hands periodically because it "doesn't feel right" to use one hand for two long, like my body isn't fully involved. When I moved to Asia and learned to use chopsticks daily, my dexterity (?) was about the same whichever hand I used. I can eat my lunch with chopsticks in the left hand while taking hands with my right, though not fully simultaneously: like simultaneous interpreting--which I have also done--using both hands at once for separate tasks makes my head feel like it's going to explode.
I agree: it seems highly likely to me that people who are natural non-conformers would be more likely to call themselves "ambidextrous" than those who are naturally conformers, regardless of their actual dexterity in either case.
This is my presumption. It's possible that this blog attracts double the base rate of the ambidextrous, but when both expected and observed rates are well under the noise floor it's hard to say - makes all the crosstabs analysis very shaky.
This is the right way to ask the question. Several of the people in my close-extended family (incl parents, cousins, aunts & uncles, etc) use their left hand for fine-motor work like drawing and eating, and right hand for dominant-motor work like batting and throwing. N = 14 in this genetic tree from my maternal grandma, and 3 of them are split-handed as described, and 1 is just plain ambidextrous.
Sports are also confounded because it's not obvious what you want to be doing with the 'dominant' hand in tasks involving both hands, and this is dependent on culture and coaching and not just neurological stuff. Famously (in some circles), most right-handed Canadian hockey players shoot left (with the dominant right hand guiding the power from the left arm) while most Americans shoot right. And vice versa, at least here in Canada: left-handed players tend to shoot right, if weakly. In the US they call this "right-handed" but this is obviously silly; here we just "shoot left," recognizing that it isn't the same as handedness and the correlation is pretty weak which side people will prefer. I also baseball-bat left, which makes sense to me because the lower hand is the one that actually directs where the bat goes. I am strongly right-handed with no hope of throwing or writing with my left.
In a lot of sports involving two handed swings, it's not all that overwhelmingly clear which is the more natural way to stand. For example, numerous lefthanders play golf righthanded, such as the great mid-century golfer Ben Hogan. That's because most sets of golf clubs are for right handers, so when left handers start out using borrowed clubs, they normally start with a right handed set and just keep playing that way their whole life.
In contrast, baseball bats are symmetrical and can be swung either way. So most lefthanders swing lefthanded (especially because it's easier to hit righthanded pitchers from the left side), although a few lefty throwers, such as Sandy Koufax, insisted on hitting righthanded.
Conversely, the greatest ever lefthanded golfer Phil Mickelson is a natural righty. The reason for this is intensely cute: When he was a toddler and his father hit golf balls in the backyard, little Phil would try to do the same. But his dad was worried he'd hit his 18 month old on the head, so he got Phil a tiny lefthanded club and had him stand directly in front of him and mirror what dad was doing. So Mickelson grew up hitting lefthanded.
All this suggests that two handed swinging sports aren't extremely handed. For example, one of the big advancements in tennis in my lifetime was the spread in the 1970s of the two-handed backhand (which for righties is like swinging a baseball bat lefthanded).
> In contrast, baseball bats are symmetrical and can be swung either way. So most lefthanders swing lefthanded (especially because it's easier to hit righthanded pitchers from the left side), although a few lefty throwers, such as Sandy Koufax, insisted on hitting righthanded.
Another key element of baseball batting is eye dominance, since the batter is facing sideways relative to the oncoming ball.
> Conversely, the greatest ever lefthanded golfer Phil Mickelson is a natural righty. The reason for this is intensely cute: When he was a toddler and his father hit golf balls in the backyard, little Phil would try to do the same. But his dad was worried he'd hit his 18 month old on the head, so he got Phil a tiny lefthanded club and had him stand directly in front of him and mirror what dad was doing. So Mickelson grew up hitting lefthanded.
If they're standing across from each other, wouldn't Mickelson Sr be bouncing golfballs off Phil's forehead?
I had a similar concern for a different reason. Some people claim ambidexterity without uhh being any good at it. Given the correlation between ambidextrousness and mental illness Scott cited, it made me wonder how much confidence I should have in self-reported ambidexterity as a proxy for actual ambidexterity vs. a proxy for mental illness.
I was thinking this too, it seems like it would be hard to figure out you're ambidextrous while growing up unless you're the type of person who does a lot of self-examination and is open to new ideas.
Psychologists at their meaningless work, correlating stuff with other stuff. And the stuff is questionnaires. A lesbian friend once showed me their hand, and told me something about the length of her index and the ring finger. IIRC she said that this proves something, I don't remember what it was.
Reading the paper made me go "Why the heck does the American National Elections Studies (ANES) have an "instrument that primarily measures submission" and do I really want to know the answer to that?" as well as "good grief, social scientists are really scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to churn out papers".
" Grillo, Pupcenoks, and Lyle (2018) administered the ANES measure of authoritarian submission to 647 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and found higher scores among consistent-handers." You can prove anything by getting some poor wretch scraping pennies on Mechanical Turk filling out surveys.
"Authoritarian submission. The ANES measure comprises four pairs of
attributes: independence versus respect for others, self-reliance versus obedience, curiosity versus good manners, and being considerate versus being well-behaved. Subjects are instructed to select the attribute in each pair that is “most important for a child to have.” Scores range from 0 to 4 by
summing how many of the following attributes are selected: respect for
others, obedience, good manners, and being well-behaved."
That seems to me to be a *terrible* 'measure'; how the heck are you supposed to choose between a flat "either/or" for "do you want your kid to be curious or well-behaved?" And why contrast "considerate" and "well-behaved", sometimes being considerate does mean being well-behaved. Same for the other measures - I'd like children to be curious, but not to the extent of blurting out in front of the assembled family "Mommy said you hated Uncle Joe" to Cousin Phil at Uncle Joe's funeral, you know? That's a situation where you'd like your little treasure to have the good manners on display, not the innocent child-like curiosity exploring the world.
The best April Fool's post is one that is true, and this seems to be a legit study. Unless Scott has planted fake papers all over the Internet just to support his joke post?
Ironic choice of example because digit ratio is actually a well-known indicator of your prenatal androgen exposure. It's significantly correlated with being gay, even.
It's ironic to denounce it as "meaningless, correlational research" and then give an example with a pretty clear causal pathway that's informative to learn of.
Though the correlation between the 2D:4D ratio and homosexuality is a bit controversial (different studies find different results) the general idea is that a low ratio (high testosterone exposure) is correlated with being attracted to women (regardless of sex) and a high ratio (low testosterone exposure) is correlated with being attracted to men (though if I recall correctly there is much less of a correlation for this one then the other). In other words, our best evidence correlates low ratios with gynephilia specifically.
Not sure why correlating stuff with questionnaires is meaningless. We often care very deeply about how people answer questions on questionnaires like ballots and demographic self-reports! And even though correlation is not causation, it tells you that *something* causal is going on here (even if the causation goes through five other variables in a complex tree).
I once was a guest professor and had a class of Bachelor students in Psychology and asked them to brainstorm about a good topic for their thesis. 90% wanted to compare men and women or correlate something with "personality", another 90% wanted to do questionnaires. Large intersection obviously, but I found the lack of ideas disturbing.
Largely because people answer in untruthful ways. Social desirability bias, misunderstanding questions, badly written questions, leading questions, people answering the same question differently on the same survey... the list goes on.
Even demographic self reports are spotty, since people answer in self serving ways, eg strategically selecting race or ethnicity. There is a whole literature on how hard decent survey execution is, and how to do it better. Not many seem to read that literature, and doing it better is still not a real fix.
Just think of those inlet forms at the doctor asking if the patient uses illegal drugs. How many people answer that honestly?
It rapidly starts to approach meaninglessness, however, since interpreting how hundreds of people may or may not have understood the question, their motives or intentions in answering, etc. All hundreds of which will be different, but you can't know that.
It is possible to do it fairly well for some topics and not have things get to crazy, but unfortunately it gets really close to interpreting chicken entrails. More importantly, almost no one is careful enough when designing or interpreting them, especially academics looking to publish something. Oh, and with small samples. In non random samples of people. All of whom happen to be the sort of person who fills out a questionnaire. And hopefully do so seriously and thoughtfully, even though you won't know if they do or not, and they just want the grade. God help you if they want to "help" the project by giving interesting answers. Or they think they know what your questions are trying to get at, and start responding accordingly. Or... anyone of a billion things.
I hope you are starting to see the problem. Interpreting questionnaires about things like "What cereal would you buy?" is not even straight forward and prone to error, much less "Hey, do you love dictators and boots stomping on people's faces forever?" If there is room for interpretation, you are already in trouble.
Yeah, this is going to come off a little mean, but I'm worried that answering "ambidextrous" on a study is what correlates with being . . . weird. Actual ambidextrous people may not be weird.
Just to be absolutely sure about a couple of things, this isn't an april fool's, right? And we can say all the words in the comments that you used in the post?
Even if it was a 1st April joke, it would be a bad one because there isn't anything special about this kind of absurd study. 100s of them are done every day by desperate bio-psycho-socio-neuro-whatever-phd-students and postdocs.
The part of the post where Scott says that libertarianism is "against" authoritarianism makes me suspect that this is indeed a joke, though. Or perhaps Scott really is that naive? Kind of hard to tell.
I think it's a "Haha, only serious" bit. He's not seriously delving into the concept of authoritarianism, like the people who've argued that the personality scale is really just "old-fashioned". He's just taking some questions that, on the surface, could be characterized as being related to authoritarianism and seeing what the result was. I do find it interesting that libertarianism & neo-reactionary beliefs had opposite correlations with handedness since the former would also count as a niche viewpoint which would have these kinds of correlations: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/11/black-people-less-likely/
It's strange that all his writings on politics are shrouded in jokes and the like. I feel that Scott Alexander has a big problem straightforwardly and openly stating what he believes.
Funny this comment coming from someone who's not being straightfowardly stating why he thinks its so wrong to think libertarians tend not to be authoritarian.
It depends what kind of libertarian. I don't think libertarians are as straightforwardly "against" authoritarianism (as vague as both of these political categories are) as Scott does.
"It depends what kind of libertarian. I don't think libertarians are as straightforwardly "against" authoritarianism"
essentially that's because marxism relies on selling authoritarianism using libertarian ideals. Your entire worldview falls apart if you're asked to differentiate between liberty and authority.
What's the baseline rate of ambidextrous people in the population? Also, is the standard being able to write with both hands equally well? Because that seems like it would be super rare. I have a tendency to distrust self-reports because small children have been telling me they're ambidextrous when they're clearly not.
I've heard stories of ambidexterous people being forced to choose one in class by their teachers at a young age. While we're speculating, we may as well speculate reverse causality here.
Maybe being forced to pick a hand is more common in areas where support for auth is high, and that's why the original study found what it found.
Maybe because your data doesn't have so many people from those areas, you can't detect the effect and instead are just getting lizardmanned.
"The paper didn't say exactly where it did the study, but some minimal detective work suggests three sites: the University of Louisville Kentucky, a second university in Louisville Kentucky I couldn't identify, and Schreiner University, a private Christian college in Texas."
"The survey was administered to a total of 297 undergraduates who participated in return for course credit. Most (N = 271) attended one of two Midwestern public universities located within ten miles of each other. We made an effort to also sample from a private university in the Southwest but, ultimately, few individuals participated (N = 26 total) and fewer still (N = 17) provided data that met criteria for inclusion outlined later in this paragraph. We, therefore, opted not to include their data in the analysis reported in this paper."
I would imagine the University of Louisville, Kentucky is one of the Midwestern public universities and Schreiner University is the private university in the Southwest. Another public university within ten miles of UL gives Jefferson Community and Technical College (it could also be Indiana University Southeast, but that's fourteen miles away) https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/kentucky/louisville/public-colleges/
So how redneck are they? Well, going by their websites:
(1) UL - hard to say. Sporty? Seem to have a rivalry going on with University of Kentucky?
(2) Schreiner - founded by a Texas Ranger and run by Presbyterians, I guess that answers that? 😁
(3) Jefferson Community and Technical College - seems diverse. Probably mostly practical minded and geared towards "education to get you into a specific job" as well as remedial courses for the less academically-able.
I don't think a "community and technical college" would be described as a "university". When I do a search for "university" on Google Maps centered at Louisville, I find Spalding University ("the most racially diverse student body of Kentucky’s private colleges"), Bellarmine University (which I'm assuming is a private religious university?), and Sullivan University (whose "about us" page asks me what my high school graduate year is and to consent to receive spam if I want to learn about them), as well as American National University (which appears to be focused on continuing education). I'm not sure that any of these is the one.
I looked up "public universities in Louisville" and Jefferson was returned as one amongst the others, so argue it out with whoever did the classification. I agree that Indiana Southeast is probably most likely as the third university here, but that depends how rigidly we are applying "within ten miles" and also the biases of the study creators and what they expected from various college/university populations.
UL doesn't have a lot of rednecks, and I'm mildly offended as a native that Scott didn't do any research before saying that. It used to be a commuter school that had a largely Black student body, and it's true that White Louisvillians tend to associate with UK and Black Louisvillians with UL. The student body is primarily drawn from Jefferson County, which is a D+16 county.
My guess is the local IU Southeast is the most likely other university. Campus to campus is about 10 miles apart as the crow flies. JCTC is a community college, not a university, and the other schools I know of are private.
The UL page about "what are the stereotypes people have about UL?" has various student responses and it's tough to interpret how much is tongue-in-cheek:
"From what I have heard the school revolves around sports and academics so I would say the stereotype is Jocks and geeks. I enjoy the school and the environment and I think it is great for just about anyone.
Urban rednecks
The stereotype is that you are either a commuter or an athlete. The commuters generally don't get involved with any of the activities on campus and most of them live at home. You can always pick out the athletes because they have the red adidas backpack with the gatorade bottle. The athletes are really friendly and don't just stick to their friends on the team.
Many people consider the University of Louisville as ghetto, wanna-be college students. This is not true in the slightest. U of L offers a diverse range of people. From wealthy to poor, foreigners to locals, jocks to artists, and everything you may think of. There are tons of groups so every person can find a place to fit in.
In general, students at U of L face the same stereotypes of anyone who lives in Kentucky (that we're all hicks who drive tractors and don't wear shoes), in addition to stereotypes about sports fans (how obsessed we are with beating UK), to give a few examples. There are also stereotypes within campus of other students - the typical nerds, jocks, preps, etc. that are present in just about any setting. And just like any stereotype about any group of people, of course these aren't very accurate. Although I'm sure there are some pretty big sports fans on campus, as well as some people that would be described by others or themselves as "rednecks," these assumptions are not in any way descriptive of every person on campus. People are complex, and take on many varying identities, and to prescribe to stereotypes is to limit people to just a few attributes that make up a much larger person."
That they *have* such a page on their website leads to me suspect they are well aware of the redneck stereotype assumption. But yeah, anywhere outside the Big City/Cities is going to have the same assumptions about rednecks, culchies, hicks from the sticks, e.g. the ongoing 'rivalry' between Dublin and the Real Capital Of Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_(city)
A commuter student is one whose parents can't or won't pay for a dorm room. So they're not rich or upper middle class. And you can't be a "party school" if everyone goes home to their parents every night. So that leaves academics and athletics.
On the other hand, the fact that they're a "university" points away from being working class. I'd imagine the redneck stereotype comes from students at a somewhat fancier school looking down on them.
I’ve become somewhat familiar with Ireland and their history from the Blindboy Podcast. I know lots about Limerick and bits about Cork, Ennius, Kilkenny, Galway, etc.
It does seem that a lot of Ireland does not identify with Dublin as the cultural center.
Some of that is okay, but really chicken fillet rolls are (1) a constant topic on r/ireland, see this sample thread https://old.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/kn76lx/whats_your_favorite_stuff_to_have_in_a_chicken/ (2) it's nothing to do with the EU or Europe, it's a follow-on from the breakfast roll which is the food that fuelled our construction boom during the heady days of the Celtic Tiger, see this song about the classic roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIIWKA_h12Q (3) now, the bit about Cuisine de France is sort of relevant - at the very end of the 80s, an Irish company set up to deliver part-baked bread products to supermarket chains, as well as supplying ovens, so that they could produce their own 'freshly baked bread' instore. This made baguettes, petit pains and rolls part of the everyday shopping experience all over the country (and working in a grocery store at the time, it was very effective as the smell of baking bread did make people buy the warm rolls). The French branding was down to the identification with 'going on holidays, eating these products, recreate the experience at home' and the perception of European sophistication, so the podcast is right about that.
As a follow-up to that, expanding the deli counter to be more than "cold sliced meats" meant things like cooking sausages, prepared pies, etc. and offering them for sale. This also meant that garage forecourt shops could get in on the act. Put it all together and it meant that for lunch breaks, your builders, school kids, and people nipping out from the office to get something quick and convenient, could have the experience of a Polish deli counter assistant asking "butter or mayonnaise?" as you took the freshly-baked Cuisine de France roll and had it loaded up with the Irish fry.
The Celtic Tiger got the mange, the good times went bye-bye, the breakfast roll fell out of favour, but eventually some enterprising soul decided to resurrect convenience artery-cloggers by using the breaded chicken fillets and fillings in a roll idea, and behold! the chicken fillet roll was born as an authentic Irish culinary experience!
Writing about Irish cuisine, this is how people used to cook in my grandparents' time, my mother grew up knowing how to cook on these, and as a small child I saw neighbours' houses with the same things: https://www.irishamericanmom.com/what-is-a-bastible/
U. of Louisville has been excellent in college basketball for several generations, winning NCAA championships in 1980, 1986, and 2013, and in college football in recent decades.
Kentucky is one of the states that early specialized in basketball, along with Kansas, Indiana, and North Carolina, all of which remain strong in college basketball.
One reason I can see that occurring naturally is if they're some form of accelerationist and hoping he'd bring about the End Times more quickly, but that's probably pretty rare.
I've run into pro-Trump Marxists. They're either hardcore tankies who place opposition to US imperialism above all other issues (and think him the lesser evil for his comparative restraint vis-a-vis the MSNBC set, and for advocating peace talks with North Korea), or they're insanely bitter post-leftists.
Efficiency? I'm just spitballing here... but if I want to be good at something with both hands, then I need to spend more time to train both hands than I would have spent only training one. So if it's a domain where there's no real advantage to being good with both hands, it makes sense to rely on one or the other. And then I assume there is a skills transfer effect which makes it more efficient to always go with one hand or the other. If I've spent time training my right hand at writing, then I go into ball throwing with no experience at all, then very first time I try throwing my right hand probably already has an advantage from it's trained dexterity from writing.
“ Based on the classification data, there were significantly more lefthanded (n = 12) than right-handed (n = 4) (z = 2.00, P < 0.05) and ambiguously handed (n = 1) subjects (z = 3.05, P < 0.01).”
Many species of fish show "handedness" or lateralization in tee-mazes presenting as a directional preference, so I'm willing to bet that such traits are relatively ancient/basal and probably broadly present across most tetrapod taxa.
Here is one of among dozens to hundreds of fish studies about this handedness in fish.
One hand holds the 'thing' piece of wood say, and the other holds the tool. Knife maybe.
I always say if my left hand ever gets a hold of a knife, it's got lots of cuts to make up for and the right should look out. Why should being ambidextrous have anything to do with closure? I think we have an over abundance of left handed presidents. I don't don't know if that goes for leaders all over time and space. (or is a low number statistical thing.)
> By the time a young lobster begins benthic life by settling to the bottom, it has two claws. However, the claws have not yet differentiated into a crusher and seizer. In the beginning, each claw has both fast- and slow-twitch muscle and there is an equal probability of the lobster becoming right or left handed. Claw type is not preordained genetically. Instead, handedness is shaped during the first two stages of benthic life depending on which claw is used the most by the juvenile lobster.
> If a lobster is deprived of sediments in the first juvenile stages, claw differentiation fails to occur and the lobster develops two seizers. By depriving juvenile lobsters of substrate and prodding either one or the other claw on a daily basis, experimental biologists can cause the manipulated claw to become dominant.
I've long been fascinated by handedness and its surprising correlates. For a while I thought about learning to use my left hand more to reap the "benefits," but now I'm pretty sure the causation goes the other way. People with abnormal hemispheric dominance are more likely to have abnormal handedness, but using a particular hand probably doesn't significantly affect the brain.
I'm rubbish at biology though, so I'd love to hear others' thoughts on whether any of this research is actionable.
I tried to do this at one point / still continue to occasionally try :) I now brush my teeth exclusively with my non dominant hand, and it feels very weird to try to use the other one, the way it felt when I switched in the first place.
When I was at uni I got some RSI in my dominant hand so forced myself to write with my weak hand. It was painstakingly slow, but I got ok at it with practice. Tried again a few months later and I'd lost it all.
I remember reading a paper years ago about the link between ambidexterity and schizophrenia. On how schizophrenics where statistically more likely to be ambidextrous. The reasoning presented in the paper was that both brain hemispheres were more connected in ambidextrous people and lead to a higher amount of cross-talk between brain hemispheres which leads to cognition disorders.
However recent googling around is showing that left handed people tend to be more likely to be schizophrenic, not ambidextrous people.
"more likely to support authoritarian governments, demonstrate prejudice against "immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, Mexicans, atheists, and liberals", and support violations of the Geneva Conventions in hypothetical scenarios."
Ah yes, the well known authoritarian position of...... opposition to the Geneva Conventions.
Do the same test but with the authoritarian answers being support for hate speech laws and gun control plus opposition to nuking fascist cities in WW2.
regarding the trans vs nonbinary thing: sure, in a vacuum, nonbinary more purely corresponds to "failure to choose". But this is confounded by the trans identity being high commitment, while a nonbinary identity can be much lower commitment. Thus you get more people who are only a little bit nonbinary identifying as such, while only those who are really really sure they're trans go through the whole ordeal associated with it (HRT etc).
- I think it's dubious to identify libertarianism as the opposite of authoritarianism. Libertarianism means a desire for less government (unless we redefine words the way Scott did in a recent post... which is fine, but I think most people understand the term this way). Some people want less government because they support the repeal of anti-discrimination laws and the freedom to live in communities defined on racial and religious lines.
- Eye dominance might be a better choice of variable than hand dominance, because it's not easily observable and not subject to social pressure. (I was never encouraged to write with my right hand, but I'm right-handed and left-eyed.)
- My jaw dropped when I saw the post title "Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?" But Scott bounced this off Zinnia Jones, who writes the wonderful GenderAnalysis.net blog, so it's cool.
Depends on how you define authoritarianism, surely. If you define it in terms of political ideas (support for powerful government with a strong leader), libertarians and anarchists (left and right) are surely on the other end of the field from that.
Yes, but (if I understand it correctly) psychologists generally think of authoritarianism as a personality trait rather than a political doctrine, and I think that's what you were going for in your mini-study. A person who wants to discipline his kids by locking them in a closet, and who doesn't want Child Protection Services to bother him about it, might qualify as politically libertarian and psychologically authoritarian.
And there are certainly a lot of Trump supporters who call themselves libertarians. Whether that makes sense as political philosophy is not really the point; even if it doesn't, it still means that self-identified libertarianism won't be a good variable to use.
Baseball season reminds us of the identity-politics group that doesn't bark: left-handers. Why are certain aggregations of once-persecuted people such as blacks or gays so politically potent today, while others such as left-handers can be safely ignored?
It's interesting that handedness is not an important identity politics category. For example, major league baseball has utterly discriminated against left-handed catchers since the 1980s, but nobody cares, other than the sideline fathers of a few stocky lefthanders. I've long challenged baseball experts to come up with the killer reason why there have been no big league left-handed catchers over the last 30 years. They confidently come up with reasons, but seldom agree.
As a left-hander, I have never been discriminated against. I've read about people in the past being forced to write right-handed, but that's totally foreign to my experience. That's why there's no left-handed id-pol. Blacks and gays, on the other hand, still face discrimination today. If you don't believe me, ask them!
Apparently, there was at some point in history some kind of Lefthander Liberation process in which Americans stopped trying to make lefthanded kids write righthanded.
If we had a Lefthander History Month, we could watch a Ken Burns documentary on PBS about how oppressed lefthanders once were and the brave souls who battled for their right to be who they are: lefthanders.
But virtually nobody cares about this forgotten history. In general, handedness doesn't make for galvanizing identity politics, although I don't have a General Theory of Identity Politics that explains perfectly which traits will be organized around and which won't.
Left handers who want to be baseball catchers are a tiny number of people. Plus, the sport overall likely can't be said to discriminate against left handers since being left handed is at least favorable for pitchers and first basemen. Those tend to be more of "glory" positions than catcher, so without polling all the world's children, I would guess more left handers who want to play baseball have an advantage rather than a disadvantage since more of them are likely going to want to be anything other than a catcher.
For what it's worth, my dad was a catcher and I kind of wonder why anyone would do it voluntarily. It's a miserable position that destroys your body compared to any other position you can play.
The situation of lefthanders in baseball is like that of blacks in football. And yet, even though blacks in football, like lefthanders in baseball, are vastly over-represented compared to their share of the population, we are frequently lectured on how the NFL needs more black quarterbacks and coaches, even though they are represented at least as well as their share of the national population. In contrast, nobody had ever brought up baseball's discrimination against lefty catchers as a social justice issue.
My broader point is that it's interesting which traits make for strong identity politics and which don't.
Guys play catcher because A. You can get to the big leagues without being able to to run fast or hit super well. B. Because it's a miserable position that destroys your body compared to any other position you can play, and some guys like being man enough to it.
Ambidexterity is used to include folks who are cross dominant (prefer a specific hand for different functions.) Given that this category is never noted, we don't know how many ambidextrous identifying people are actually cross dominant, which seems to me relevant to the possible correlations posed here.
"Need for cognitive closure" sounds like a more specific/complicated version of "satisfaction with/tendency towards local maxima", and a bit too anthropomorphic at that.
Trans (incl non-binary, which is generally also trans. Bisexual isn't 'can't choose', but rather 'won't choose') today requires high activation energy to overcome a strong local-maxima of "probably cis". This matches the observation that trans (indeed all LGBTQ) identification is increasing in cultures that are reducing the gradient for escaping the "you're cis/straight/etc" local-maxima. If people remain ambidextrous despite the general gradient towards favoring development of one side over the other, we should expect them to similarly be more resilient to being boxed into the gender they were assigned at birth. With the same activation energy, someone resilient to gradients would be more likely to transition.
I think it's the same for any heterodox exploration/development, including the self-actualized authoritarians within largely non-authoritarian demographics.
Maybe it's an interesting speculation that tendency to follow gradients is protective against mental illness. Follow the gradients that everyone else follows, and maybe you won't hit the activation energy for something bad like "maybe the voices in my head are real and dire warnings".
I am however concerned that my model here seems to answer these questions *too* readily, which is always suspicious.
Yeah, it's weird how similar their arguments are to those deployed against gay and lesbian youth back a generation or so ago. Everything old is new again! Except me, dammit, I'm still as decrepit as ever.
A lot of Glenn Greenwald's argument is about how he was gay & restricted by society back then and he isn't going to have some johnny-come-lately in a marriage that was always legal teach him how to suck the eggs of resistance to the cisheteropatriarchy. But I guess that could be compared to certain radical tendencies of gay politics who disagreed with Andrew Sullivan when he popped up arguing for gay marriage.
But I wonder if what's actually being found here is a general factor of *self-identification* as weird, unique, non-conforming, etc.
Imagine two people who are both above averagely dexterous with their non-dominant hand, both moderately gender non-conforming, and both nerdy and socially awkward, but one is the type of person who likes to think of themselves as weird and unique, and the other isn't. The first will describe themselves as ambidextrous, transgender, and autistic, while the second will describe themselves as none of the above; hence the correlations.
"Second, a question asking respondents to rank their support for more open immigration, on a 1 - 5 scale. I figured that was a fair proxy for prejudice against immigrants, Mexicans, and Muslims."
I have a problem with applying the label "prejudice" to an opposition to open borders that is often based on lots of relevant evidence, such the awareness of racial disparities in IQ, FBI crime statistics, income, taxes paid, welfare consumed, propensity for scientific achievement, etc. It reminds me of creationists calling scientists' aversion to creationism a "prejudice" as if the scientists hadn't come across any evidence against it.
I'd like to see a pro-immigration guy sit down and calculate how many utilons more open immigration would provide for the existing inhabitants of the US and their posterity, taking into account the decline of average IQ, reduced per capita tax receipts, increase in crime for the 2nd+ generation, and so forth.
I'd guess from international HDI and IQ comparisons that life is at least 10% worse for each 5 point drop in the national average IQ, so if a country with a population of 330M and an average IQ of 100 brings in an extra 20M people with an average IQ of 85, the new average IQ is 99 and life is 2% worse for the 330M and their posterity indefinitely. Total cost over the first century is 660 million QALYs. Maybe it's partially a one-way ratchet where a high national average IQ can set up institutions that the country can continue to benefit from after the IQ drops, up to a point, but if it goes even lower those institutions break down.
This reminds me of project prevention, which is a charity that's probably even more cost-effective than malaria prevention, because it pays underclass drug addicts to partake of long-term contraception, to prevent low IQ unwanted children from being born. The math above works out such that preventing an IQ 70 kid from being born is worth about 60% of a QALY per year forever for everyone else, assuming he would have reproduced at about replacement. If there's no discount rate because future people's lives are as important as our own, then the positive utility of preventing that birth is infinite, if we ignore the singularity or other hypothetical discontinuities. Infinite utility for $1000 seems like a good deal. It probably ought to be discounted by the probability of some kind of future discontinuity in the utility of the national average IQ, though. Strong AI might make it irrelevant in 40 years. But as a precaution we should be reluctant to rely on some hypothetical future discontinuity. The uncertainty around when strong AI will happen is very large. It might be a century or two. Or we might never even get there due to an idiocracy scenario. Dysgenics is an existential risk to our potential to invent strong AI and colonize the galaxy. If we get dumber we'll continue using up the earth's resources without accomplishing any technological progress.
Not sure why the effective altruism community doesn't put more effort into eugenics, other than the taboo.
I didn't become an immigration restrictionist until I realized when I was 40 in 1999 that mass immigration was, on the whole, bad for the left half of the bell curve of my fellow American citizens. So, it can't be said to be prejudice in my case because I was mostly pro-immigration up through my cancer in 1997, at which point I decided to become a full time intellectual and started intensely studying up on social issues. I founded an email group in 1999 that included superstar intellectuals (e.g., two members subsequently won Nobel prizes) and, somewhat to my surprise, discovered that the immigration restrictionists had the best of the arguments.
Out of an abundance of caution I will slightly obfuscate a certain word, beginning with N, which was filtered on the old site. The thing about this speculative analysis is that Novoreactionaries are not homogeneous, and those who post here or who posted on SSC are less likely to conform to the stereotype of "need for cognitive closure". You have the Blut und Boden adjacents, who don't post here (or who post until banned, I guess?). You have the amerikaners, who are off doing amerikaner things. And then you have the other guys. I know for a fact that Curtis "M*ldb*g" Yarvin reads this stack, because he posted about it a few weeks ago. I take it that everyone agrees that he is comprehended under the "N" word at issue? Here's a bright idea of his that he recently advocated: monarchy with adoptive trans-Salic succession. That is, every monarch must be a Queen, every Queen must be a transwoman, and each Queen *adopts* Her successor. Say what you like about this, but I don't think it bespeaks a "need for cognitive closure". And even if you think he was just joshing your shorts, that per se shows a certain ambiguity that could easily correlate to hemispheric non-dominance, ambidexterity, blah-de-blah. Bottom line: novoreactionaries who post here are just like other TRUE weirdos: they screw with your statistics. On a personal note, I consider myself strongly right-hand dominant, but a few weeks ago I started learning guitar. What struck me was how well my non-dominant hand can master things – it's just a matter of practice. I suspect that a considerable part of ambidexterity is determined by willingness to practice with the so-called non-dominant hand, and that eventually this may even lead to gross changes in brain morphology. The causation is just too complicated to tease out with blunt instruments like the political ones used here.
Adoptive dynasties is how the Roman emperors often did it. I believe in Japan there was also a tradition of adopting people who were already adults because of that norm of having an heir.
Supposedly there is a successful inn in Japan that's been in the same family for 2000 years, but presumably that's because of adoption of the best employees.
"Here's a bright idea of his that he recently advocated: monarchy with adoptive trans-Salic succession. That is, every monarch must be a Queen, every Queen must be a transwoman, and each Queen *adopts* Her successor"
Damn it, that's so brilliantly bonkers that it overcomes my ingrained "not an inch" tendencies and makes me smile, so well done!
Greg Cochran used to suggest schizophrenia was pathogenic due to clustering of births in certain months, but now he thinks it's like low IQ: lots of rare deleterious genes of very small effect presumably due to mutational load and not any kind of alternate "strategy".
Being persistently nonbinary might be linked to lower need for cognitive closure than being trans, but it's widely observed that trans people tend to don a nonbinary identity before deciding that they're trans, as a kind of stepping stone. Without looking at any data, I bet there there's more of these people who are nonbinary as a stepping stone to being trans than there are persistently nonbinary people, and that that genre of nonbinary person is likely to have greater need for cognitive closure than someone who jumps into being trans right away, while someone who ends up persistently nonbinary has less need for gcognitive closure than either of the other categories.
Katie Herzog (in the Blocked and Reported podcast) speculated, based on people she knows, that 10 years ago teenage girls attracted to other girls would identify as lesbian. But now they tend to identify as nonbinary. In which case, I would expect gay and nonbinary to have similar need for cognitive closure. It's just current social conventions that influence the choice between lesbian or non-binary identity.
In Herzog's conversation with Glenn Greenwald (which I linked in another comment here), it was noted that the overwhelming majority of self-identified bisexuals (who also tend to be disproportionately young & female) who were in a relationship/married said they were with an opposite sex partner. So an extrapolated future might consist of men divided into gays & straights, while women are divided into bi & nonbi :)
She also said in that interview that women tend to be closer to the middle of the Kinsey Scale than men. So that makes me wonder if there's a statistically significant difference between men and women in any of those measures of need for cognitive closure.
I'm not sure what cognitive closure has to do with it. (besides this post) Biologically, two women (getting some sperm here or there.) is a viable way to have a family and pass on your genes... Given brutish men, it might even be selected for genetically. (Is it terrible for me to ask if lesbianism is passed down genetically?)
Yes, the original post was about need for cognitive closure correlations. If it correlates with sexual preference then it may correlate with the Kinsey Scale. And if it correlates with Kinsey Scale and if gender correlates with the Kinsey Scale, then that makes me wonder about gender and need for cognitive closure.
A simple model is that men pursue mating opportunities with women, and women choose which ones to accept. I know William Buckner (@Evolving_Moloch) disagrees with that because frequently women didn't have a choice, but it fits things like how males tend to advertise how humorous they are and women prefer man based on that, like mating displays seen in other species. So if women evolved to evaluate people pursuing them, there might not actually be as much selection for sexual orientation simply because there wouldn't have been as many women doing that in the past. Whereas if men evolved to look around and pursue someone they find attractive, they could more easily waste time on a dead end without that sort of filter.
I am really tired of these "measurements of authoritarianism". I'm going to try and avoid politics, as much as possible, and just criticize these methods. For example, they say that supporting Trump = supporting authoritarianism.
Now I've written a couple of posts saying Trump was better than those opposing him. For example, that H.C. bringing back Kissinger, friend of tyrants all over the planet, made her utterly unacceptable. And that the deep state - the American national security apparatus - had done worse things that Trump was capable of, such as ratting out Nelson Mandela to the Afrikaner cops, murdering Patrice Lumumba and supporting the overthrow of democratic regimes all over the planet. Does that qualify as support for authoritarianism?
(Yes, yes, I support Trump out of my respect for Mandela - trust me the irony, no, insanity, of that statement is not lost on me)
And what about all those who supported him out of 4chan style nihilism - 'for the lulz' or simply out of a visceral desire to 'burn it all down'? (Incidentally, the one promise he came damn close to fulfilling). That's anarchism, literally the opposite of authoritarianism.
I just want to highlight the problems of these polls and this measurement.
I referenced the critique of "authoritarian" personality scales as really just picking up more old-fasioned personalities elsewhere in this thread. Here's a post on that idea: http://www.econlib.org/the-old-fashioned-personality/
These measurements are thought to correlate with authoritarianism, not necessitate it. So they assume a person who supports Trump is more likely to support authoritarianism in general, but that doesn't imply everyone who suppors Trump is more authoritarian than average. Opposite examples existing doesn't disprove this correlation.
I, too, am focusing on the specific issue and ignoring the politics here.
Again, how does one measure these? Sure you can say my views on Kissinger & the CIA place me in the minority - but the whole "fed up, not taking it anymore, just smash everything" is much, much more distributed among Trump supporters. Heck, it's practically the whole energy of the movement.
When I think of "authoritarian personalities", I think of people who like authority and want more of it. That can either be in the lurid form - e.g. "Bronze Age Pervert", and the rest of the Pajama AltRight crowd - or in the form of just wanting 'sensible' regulation that 'gets stuff done'. I don't think of people who just want to torch the whole system as having failed.
IIRC, having an index finger longer than your ring finger is a sign of having had high testosterone in the womb. I remember this mainly because my hands don't match.
You've got it reversed - longer ring finger maps to higher prenatal testosterone
Oh, ok. So I've got a feminine left hand (my stronger hand), and an androgynous right hand. Both hands are hairy, though.
It's even worse because it's the *ratio* of index finger: ring finger that signifies - something. I can't work out what, because the search entries all return trashy articles and the scientific papers don't say very much.
So lower ratio is more masculine/higher ratio is more feminine, but that is about all they agree on. If I measure my hands, I just about fall into the feminine range (oh, what a relief):
"From a study of 136 males and 137 females at the University of Alberta:
Males: mean 0.947, standard deviation 0.029
Females: mean 0.965, standard deviation 0.026
Assuming a normal distribution, the above lead to 95% prediction intervals for 2D:4D ratio of 0.889–1.005 for males and 0.913–1.017 for females.
From a 2018 study on a final sample of 249 graduate and undergraduate students from Warwick University, proportionally balanced by gender:
Males: mean 0.951, standard deviation 0.035
Females: mean 0.968, standard deviation 0.028"
I have a 'male' non-dominant left hand and a 'female' dominant right-hand, what does this mean? Probably nothing.
Am I reading this right? Is this saying that a ring finger longer than the index finger is the norm for both sexes? And the reverse, or equal lengths, would be hyper-feminine? Because that's what I've got, and I'm male.
Oh, it's a pain to try and figure it out. What I extracted from the mess of papers and horrible pop journalism articles:
(1) Most people tend to have the ring (4D) finger longer than their index (2D) finger
(2) Men tend to have longer ring fingers, because they have bigger hands than women
(3) Women tend to have index fingers only slighter longer than their index fingers
(4) So - to do a very exaggerated example - if you have an index finger (2D) that measures 88 mm and a ring finger (4D) that measures 90 m, your 2D:4D ratio will be 88/90 = 0.98. This is a high 2D:4D ratio and means you are a girly girl.
If your index finger is 88 mm and your ring finger is 106 mm, your ratio will be 88/106 = 0.83. Congratulations, you have a low 2D:4D ratio and are indeed a man.
So what if you are a woman with big fingers or a man with small hands? Could be down to testosterone exposure in the womb. Or something else. What does that mean? Here come all the dreadful pop journalism articles about you're gay, etc. The science papers say "kinda works for women, no correlation with gay men". Basically, it's about as good at forecasting real conditions as the popular Asian "if your bloodtype is this, you are that".
You did four tests; did you do Bonferroni correction?
No, I'm actually not sure how to do that in cases where multiple tests pass the threshold. I should look that up.
It's very easy! Just divide your significance threshold by the number of tests you perform and only exclaim "significant!" if the p-value is below that level.
Is that right? Suppose I got p = 0.049 on one test - that would pass the threshold. But suppose I did ten tests and got p = 0.049 on all of them. Realistically that is much more evidence - it's basically equivalent to getting a positive experiment and replicating it nine times. But it sounds like using your method, none of the tests would pass the threshold, and I would have to claim I got no evidence from any of them.
If you just do Bonferroni you wouldn't "get anything", but Bonferroni is the most conservative way to control for multiple comparisons. If your tests are all very correlated, or are such that the results should be correlated (as you seem to imply), Bonferroni is a very bad way to control for experimentwise error.
Shouldn't there be a sort of expected value calculation where you compare the number of false positives you expect to get with random data and X number of comparisons with the number you actually got? Andrew Gelman always complains that statistical significance adds "noise" due to the difference between significant & insignificant itself being insignificant, and Scott's hypothetical shows how that gets compounded here.
Some more thoughts on this: a smaller sample size makes it more difficult to obtain statistical significance. With this correction, it's treating your actual sample size like a smaller sample size. So for any sample size, there is presumably some number of questions that would make it nigh impossible to get statistical significance. I guess that would be related to "the curse of dimensionality". I'd guess it would also relate to doing between-subject studies and within-subject studies.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/16/why-do-a-within-person-rather-than-a-between-person-experiment/
If I recall, it does actually give the right answer if all the tests are independent. It's a reasonable idea for this kind of situation, when you're just kind of looking at a set of things
In this case I'm looking at four different ways of fleshing out the same hypothesis, so I think it's really far from independent.
Holm-Bonferroni or Benjamini-Hochberg are improvements over standard Bonferroni that would alleviate this problem.
With Bonferroni I believe you'd want to divide by the number of tests, not just the number of significant tests.
And yes, in the situation you describe (10 tests with p = .049) it does create the seemingly paradoxical outcome where you end up with no significant results post-correction, whereas you would if you'd only run one test. But that's exactly the point of Bonferroni: you want a more stringent alpha if you're testing more hypotheses.
As others have mentioned, there are other correction methods, which range in complexity. I've used Holm-Bonferroni in a lot of my own research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holm%E2%80%93Bonferroni_method
Does HB have a way of handling ties, as there are in the example here? There doesn't seem to be a way to resolve which result is most significant. Usually this is a probability zero situation, but p-values from exact tests, for instance, don't have a continuous distribution, so it's not an impossible situation necessarily. Though I do admit it's a navel-gazey question for sure.
I don't think so. It's a fair question since HB requires ranking your results, so I'm not sure how that's usually dealt with.
The whole idea of multiple comparisons corrections gets messy pretty quickly once you start peeking beneath the surface. Personally I think the general spirit of the thing is still quite reasonable, but there are lots of practical cases where it's hard to figure out what the least wrong thing to do is.
Bonferoni is an *extremely* stringent threshold. Check out Benjamin-Hochberg for a much more practical adjustment procedure. B-H lets you set a false discovery rate that you're comfortable with.
+1
The phrase you are looking for is "hierarchical modeling."
The hierarchy is from general to specific. If you do 10 related tests and get .049 on all of them, that is strong evidence for a vague hypothesis that encompasses all of them, but weak evidence for any of the specific formulations.
One thing that you can do is combine the four questions into a single authoritarianism scale. Take z scores of each of the four questions, rescaling each one so they all have the same mean (0) and standard deviation (1) with higher numbers corresponding to the more authoritarian option. (Or maybe treat them as 3 questions, since two of them came from the same survey question.) Then add or average them together so that each person gets a single score on your authoritarianism scale.
Then you don't have to worry about multiple comparisons since there's just one scale, and by averaging a few questions together into a single scale you can get less noise relative to the signal in your measure of how authoritarian people are.
If your null is a point hypothesis, then the p-value is uniformly distributed on [0,1]. If your experiments are independent (does not matter whether it's multiple experiments for the same question or different ones), then if all the nulls hold, the tuple of p-values you get is an iid sample from uniform. Thus you can do a statistical test to see if at least one hull is violated by seeing how likely such an extreme tuple or an even more extreme one is under the "iid from uniform" sampling. One way is to look at the minimum. The probability that the minimum is below some threshold t is 1-(1-t)^n<nt, so if the smallest of your p-values is below 0.05/n then either one of the nulls is false, or an event with probability less than 0.05 has happened. This is usually considered "statistically significant evidence" that one of the nulls is false. Technically, it does not tell you which one, but oh well. Note that this replicates the Bonferoni correction. One drawback is what you are describing -- I do 20 experiments and get p=0.1 in each one of them. This does not look like 20 samples from uniform, but my min-based test fails to reject. This is a failure of the test. But failing to reject is not a confirmation! One could do a different test, not based on the minimum. You could look at the sum (apparently sum of uniforms is called Irwin-Hall), or at the product (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_distribution#Uniformly_distributed_independent_random_variables). Either of these will reject the "all nulls" null in your case (again, without telling you which one). For the sum, and the example of twenty results of p=0.1 the Irwin-Hall gives the "combined p-value" on the order of 2^20/20! aka 10^-13, in accord with the intuition that getting 1-in-10 lucky 20 times in a row is unlikely. In your case of n=4 and p = (0.049, 0.008, 0.48, 0.052), the sum is 0.589, and the n=4 Irwin-Hall CDF at x=0.589 is (0.589)^4/4!=0.005. So if all the nulls held you have just witnessed a 1/200-probability event. Usually, we reject the "joint null" at this point.
Despite some confusion at the Wiki link, the product is actually even easier: "-ln uniform" is exponential, so the sum is a gamma distribution. We have -ln(0.049*0.008*0.48*0.052)=11.5, and from the CDF of our gamma distribution, the "combined p-value" from this test is (1-gamma(4,11.5)/6) which Wolfram tells me is about 0.00336425. So, even better, 1/300 unlikely. (For the fake "20 times of 0.1" example I get 5.6x10^-6, a bit less extreme than before, but still quite small; it is of course possible I have made some mistakes).
Note that Bonferroni and some other methods do not assume independence of the p-values, whereas, as I said, these homemade tests in my comments do. It is not very clear to me how strong this independence assumption is. It seems that various "standard" methods try to avoid it (or at least allow only non-negative dependence; I don't know if the "sum" or "product" tests generalize to the non-negatively dependent p-values).
Bonferroni correction would just mean the standard for significance is just e.g. 0.0125 rather than 0.05, right? One of the tests passes that threshold, so we can still say Scott found something. In general though I would only expect a multiple comparisons correction if the tests that achieved a lower p-value were preferentially reported (e.g. in a searchlight-type study).
no, you have to halve it again to 0.00625 because it's a two-tailed test. (i.e. there are 8 hypotheses: ambidextrous people are trumpier; ambidextrous people are less trumpy; ambidextrous people are pro-immigration; ambidextrous people are anti-immigration...)
Well, that depends on whether Scott did a two-tailed test to begin with, no? E.g. if it's a two-tailed test with reported p=0.008, it would have reached p=0.004 if it were one-tailed, so I think that halving is already built-in. I'm not an expert on this though.
He reached the opposite conclusion of the original study though, so doesn't that mean he must have been looking at both tails if he was originally trying to replicate it?
Yes, that's what I'm saying. A two-tailed test is essentially a mini-Bonferroni correction - it's equivalent to doing a left-tailed test and a right-tailed test, taking the smaller of the two p-values, and multiplying that by 2. If he had done 2 one-tailed tests, he would have gotten p=0.004, which would not take the multiple comparisons into account.
Statistically speaking, most people run two tailed tests even when they're only really expecting a result one way. Scott probably did too (ideally, he'd have reported what he did). This is due to conventions in the field and defaults in software packages. You get weird looks running one-tailed tests even if you honest to God were only expecting a difference in one direction.
Also put my vote in for FDR/Benjamini-Hochberg. tho it works out the same in this case. One result is significant and three are not.
That one is worth writing about, because it's significant even after multiple comparisons
FWERs reduce power pretty harshly, I like False Discovery Rate methods better myself.
I would not recommend Bonferroni: it abates the power of the test so much that it makes it completely uninformative. Benjamini-Hochberg can guarantee a very reasonable alpha with minimal loss of power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_discovery_rate
Can you PLEASE switch to Bayesian analysis? This p-statistics stuff is pure crap.
The wonderful thing about Bayesian analysis is that you, the commenter, can do it all on your lonesome. Work out your priors, crunch some numbers, and take this new info into account. Or, just use your intuitive ideas of how to change your mind based on new evidence, which of course runs on bayesian analysis anyway. Of course, you'll just be doing a similar thing to the whole bottom half of the post, because the frequentist statistics are just to get an idea of how strongly to weigh the evidence (a dataset like this is hard to analyze otherwise).
Of course I could do it myself, the point is why does Scott do highly misleading frequentist analysis instead? It is nearly impossible to correctly interpret p statistics is low-statistics situations; in particular, p<0.05 does NOT mean that the probability is 95% that the effect is real, but that's what almost everyone implicitly assumes (even people who know better).
What does it mean?
Scott looked at many hypothesis, so even if they were all false, there's some chance that one shows the p-value we like. And that's why people up and down this comment are talking about methods that make the p threshold get lower as you look at more hypothesis.
To me, nothing about all that makes any sense, but I haven't thought about this deeply. Like, look at all the hypothesis you want as long as you don't cherry-pick the data. Now, interpret the results correctly. If you are testing whether aliens live in our toilets and feed on love and get a significant result with p=0.01, well... what were your prior chances of that being true? 1:1,000,000,000. Okay, now they are around 1:10,000,000. Big deal
I know, I know, when you choose the hypothesis based on the data, you are sorta choosing the data points: how many experiments did you *not* use to update the alien hypothesis because it didn't stand out?
Still, I get the impression this is being too nitpicky and not remotely the core of our problems. It would all be much better if the conclusions of papers were: "THIS hypothesis, ridiculous as it sounds, got a 20 log-odds update up; and THIS one, which sounded so plausible to us, fell 10 log-odds from your priors. The full data is available here for anyone to analyse and aggregate. See ya!". Then, serious review papers should look at the raw data of all studies where the hypotheses can be tested and not only those that wrote about it in their conclusions. Or maybe, papers could also present their assumptions, causal networks, priors.
But this p thing doesn't make much sense to me. "Ok, we claim we got a positive test for something with a false positive rate of 4%! Therefore, report it in the newspapers (especially if it's a surprising finding, i.e., something ridiculous with a low prior and/or important for the world at large!)"
But it's pretty good as evidence that the original hypothesis (the one he was inspired by) is either not true, not powerful, or needs drastic reinterpretation.
A p-value is the probability of obtaining a test statistic at least that large, assuming the null hypothesis.
This relies on the concept of a sampling distribution, which is the distribution of test statistics you'd get under the null hypothesis (e.g., for a two-sample t-test, where the true difference in population means is 0), based on the degrees of freedom (#observations, roughly). So once you obtain your actual test statistic, you ask: how likely is this test statistic to have come from that sampling distribution?
This is not the same as the probability of the null hypothesis being true, i.e., p(H0), and it's also not the inverse probability of the alternative hypothesis, i.,e., p(H1).
It means that if EXACTLY that experiment were done multiple times (without combining the data sets), then the looked-for effect would have been seen in 95% of them. But to translate this to a probability that the effect is "really there" requires a prior. Frequentists HATE priors, and so refuse to do it. However, no one really cares about that particular experiment, what we really care about is if the effect is "real". So even frequentists make the illegal mental shift to thinking that the 95% applies to the reality of the effect, which is wrong. In high-statistics situations, it's not VERY wrong, only a little bit wrong. But in low-statistics situations the prior becomes ever more important. There is always an implicit prior that corresponds to the illegal mental leap, but sometimes this is a deeply weird prior that no one would pick.
... which is exactly why p-values etc. are pretty a pretty useful starting point for Bayesian updating. I know we like to bash them because people misinterpret them, but that doesn't mean they're useless.
A P-value is pretty decent estimate of how much less likely the evidence is in a world where the null hypothesis is true. This is exactly p(evidence|model), which you can then translate to p(model|evidence) with your priors. Just Bayesian calculations dress it up a little differently and call it "likelihoods".
It means, if the effect is NOT real, you could maybe still see similar results about 5% of the time (if p=0.05). So if you test stuff that's obviously false enough times (or look at many different obviously false hypothesis) you'll still get "statistically significant" crap results.
(had to delete and re-post to fix and add that "NOT"...)
Say you get some random coin from your pocket, and for some paranoid reason suspect that it's loaded to aalways fall on heads when flipped. And you test that by flipping it.
If it comes heads, that's a positive result (because it's more likely to happen if the coin is loaded (100%) than if it's not (50%)). However, if it's not loaded (as it obviously isn't, you are just paranoid), you had 50% chances of seeing that. So, p=0.5.
Flip it again. Another heads. Same analysis. Now p=0.25. Flip 5 heads in a row and, p=0.03! You're ready to publish your idiocy in a paper.
(But that's at least better than flipping it 5 times, getting heads-tails-tails-tails-heads, and publishing that the coin is rigged to flip that exact sequence. )
Bayesian aren't good in multiple testing either. See this paper, especially Section 5 weaseling around about multiple outcomes. http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/multiple2.pdf
That paper explains very clearly why Bayesian analysis is ALWAYS better, INCLUDING in the multiple-outcomes situation (which is simply inherently more complicated).
I was disappointed by Section 5, telling me basically twice that it's too complicated with multiple outcomes. Unsure what you mean by very clearly in Section 5.
Here's something promising, looking at multiple binary outcomes/adverse events in a cancer study in a Bayes way
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/sim.4780140404
Did any of the studies get subjects to do dexterity tasks with their left vs right hands or did they just ask them whether they're ambidextrous? Maybe all the ambidextrous liberals never figured out that they're ambidextrous.
It seems like they asked a number of questions about which hand they use for particular tasks. I agree, it seems plausible that among ambidexterous people, those who generally think of themselves as conventional persons are more likely to answer that they use their right hand, and also give more conventional answers to other questions.
Perhaps this is a dumb question, but doesn’t ambidexterity usually mean someone is innately left-handed but was encouraged to use the right hand for some tasks?
Not in my experience. I've always switched hands. I predominantly use my right-hand because...school, society...but can switch without thinking about it for most tasks except writing. If my right hand is injured, I can get up to speed with my left for writing tasks in less than an hour. Learning sports was challenging because some days I feel more right or left handed than others, and coaches find that confusing. When playing handed sports like badminton, I switch hands periodically because it "doesn't feel right" to use one hand for two long, like my body isn't fully involved. When I moved to Asia and learned to use chopsticks daily, my dexterity (?) was about the same whichever hand I used. I can eat my lunch with chopsticks in the left hand while taking hands with my right, though not fully simultaneously: like simultaneous interpreting--which I have also done--using both hands at once for separate tasks makes my head feel like it's going to explode.
I agree: it seems highly likely to me that people who are natural non-conformers would be more likely to call themselves "ambidextrous" than those who are naturally conformers, regardless of their actual dexterity in either case.
This is my presumption. It's possible that this blog attracts double the base rate of the ambidextrous, but when both expected and observed rates are well under the noise floor it's hard to say - makes all the crosstabs analysis very shaky.
This is the right way to ask the question. Several of the people in my close-extended family (incl parents, cousins, aunts & uncles, etc) use their left hand for fine-motor work like drawing and eating, and right hand for dominant-motor work like batting and throwing. N = 14 in this genetic tree from my maternal grandma, and 3 of them are split-handed as described, and 1 is just plain ambidextrous.
And 3 are too young to have demonstrated consistent preference, for those keeping score at home.
Sports are also confounded because it's not obvious what you want to be doing with the 'dominant' hand in tasks involving both hands, and this is dependent on culture and coaching and not just neurological stuff. Famously (in some circles), most right-handed Canadian hockey players shoot left (with the dominant right hand guiding the power from the left arm) while most Americans shoot right. And vice versa, at least here in Canada: left-handed players tend to shoot right, if weakly. In the US they call this "right-handed" but this is obviously silly; here we just "shoot left," recognizing that it isn't the same as handedness and the correlation is pretty weak which side people will prefer. I also baseball-bat left, which makes sense to me because the lower hand is the one that actually directs where the bat goes. I am strongly right-handed with no hope of throwing or writing with my left.
In a lot of sports involving two handed swings, it's not all that overwhelmingly clear which is the more natural way to stand. For example, numerous lefthanders play golf righthanded, such as the great mid-century golfer Ben Hogan. That's because most sets of golf clubs are for right handers, so when left handers start out using borrowed clubs, they normally start with a right handed set and just keep playing that way their whole life.
In contrast, baseball bats are symmetrical and can be swung either way. So most lefthanders swing lefthanded (especially because it's easier to hit righthanded pitchers from the left side), although a few lefty throwers, such as Sandy Koufax, insisted on hitting righthanded.
Conversely, the greatest ever lefthanded golfer Phil Mickelson is a natural righty. The reason for this is intensely cute: When he was a toddler and his father hit golf balls in the backyard, little Phil would try to do the same. But his dad was worried he'd hit his 18 month old on the head, so he got Phil a tiny lefthanded club and had him stand directly in front of him and mirror what dad was doing. So Mickelson grew up hitting lefthanded.
All this suggests that two handed swinging sports aren't extremely handed. For example, one of the big advancements in tennis in my lifetime was the spread in the 1970s of the two-handed backhand (which for righties is like swinging a baseball bat lefthanded).
> In contrast, baseball bats are symmetrical and can be swung either way. So most lefthanders swing lefthanded (especially because it's easier to hit righthanded pitchers from the left side), although a few lefty throwers, such as Sandy Koufax, insisted on hitting righthanded.
Another key element of baseball batting is eye dominance, since the batter is facing sideways relative to the oncoming ball.
> Conversely, the greatest ever lefthanded golfer Phil Mickelson is a natural righty. The reason for this is intensely cute: When he was a toddler and his father hit golf balls in the backyard, little Phil would try to do the same. But his dad was worried he'd hit his 18 month old on the head, so he got Phil a tiny lefthanded club and had him stand directly in front of him and mirror what dad was doing. So Mickelson grew up hitting lefthanded.
If they're standing across from each other, wouldn't Mickelson Sr be bouncing golfballs off Phil's forehead?
I had a similar concern for a different reason. Some people claim ambidexterity without uhh being any good at it. Given the correlation between ambidextrousness and mental illness Scott cited, it made me wonder how much confidence I should have in self-reported ambidexterity as a proxy for actual ambidexterity vs. a proxy for mental illness.
I was thinking this too, it seems like it would be hard to figure out you're ambidextrous while growing up unless you're the type of person who does a lot of self-examination and is open to new ideas.
Psychologists at their meaningless work, correlating stuff with other stuff. And the stuff is questionnaires. A lesbian friend once showed me their hand, and told me something about the length of her index and the ring finger. IIRC she said that this proves something, I don't remember what it was.
Based comment. This is exactly how I feel about this.
Btw this is April fools post
Maybe, I am easily fooled. The thing that really makes me depressed is that it could be true.
Reading the paper made me go "Why the heck does the American National Elections Studies (ANES) have an "instrument that primarily measures submission" and do I really want to know the answer to that?" as well as "good grief, social scientists are really scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to churn out papers".
" Grillo, Pupcenoks, and Lyle (2018) administered the ANES measure of authoritarian submission to 647 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and found higher scores among consistent-handers." You can prove anything by getting some poor wretch scraping pennies on Mechanical Turk filling out surveys.
"Authoritarian submission. The ANES measure comprises four pairs of
attributes: independence versus respect for others, self-reliance versus obedience, curiosity versus good manners, and being considerate versus being well-behaved. Subjects are instructed to select the attribute in each pair that is “most important for a child to have.” Scores range from 0 to 4 by
summing how many of the following attributes are selected: respect for
others, obedience, good manners, and being well-behaved."
That seems to me to be a *terrible* 'measure'; how the heck are you supposed to choose between a flat "either/or" for "do you want your kid to be curious or well-behaved?" And why contrast "considerate" and "well-behaved", sometimes being considerate does mean being well-behaved. Same for the other measures - I'd like children to be curious, but not to the extent of blurting out in front of the assembled family "Mommy said you hated Uncle Joe" to Cousin Phil at Uncle Joe's funeral, you know? That's a situation where you'd like your little treasure to have the good manners on display, not the innocent child-like curiosity exploring the world.
The best April Fool's post is one that is true, and this seems to be a legit study. Unless Scott has planted fake papers all over the Internet just to support his joke post?
Ironic choice of example because digit ratio is actually a well-known indicator of your prenatal androgen exposure. It's significantly correlated with being gay, even.
Where's the irony? Does this correlation add meaning to meaningless correlational research 😅
It's ironic to denounce it as "meaningless, correlational research" and then give an example with a pretty clear causal pathway that's informative to learn of.
Is it correlated with being homosexual for both males and females? I thought it might have had opposite correlation for one vs the other.
If I remember right, yes. But I wouldn't take my word for it here.
Though the correlation between the 2D:4D ratio and homosexuality is a bit controversial (different studies find different results) the general idea is that a low ratio (high testosterone exposure) is correlated with being attracted to women (regardless of sex) and a high ratio (low testosterone exposure) is correlated with being attracted to men (though if I recall correctly there is much less of a correlation for this one then the other). In other words, our best evidence correlates low ratios with gynephilia specifically.
Not sure why correlating stuff with questionnaires is meaningless. We often care very deeply about how people answer questions on questionnaires like ballots and demographic self-reports! And even though correlation is not causation, it tells you that *something* causal is going on here (even if the causation goes through five other variables in a complex tree).
I once was a guest professor and had a class of Bachelor students in Psychology and asked them to brainstorm about a good topic for their thesis. 90% wanted to compare men and women or correlate something with "personality", another 90% wanted to do questionnaires. Large intersection obviously, but I found the lack of ideas disturbing.
Largely because people answer in untruthful ways. Social desirability bias, misunderstanding questions, badly written questions, leading questions, people answering the same question differently on the same survey... the list goes on.
Even demographic self reports are spotty, since people answer in self serving ways, eg strategically selecting race or ethnicity. There is a whole literature on how hard decent survey execution is, and how to do it better. Not many seem to read that literature, and doing it better is still not a real fix.
Just think of those inlet forms at the doctor asking if the patient uses illegal drugs. How many people answer that honestly?
None of this means that these questionnaires are *meaningless* - just that you have to be careful when designing them and interpreting them.
It rapidly starts to approach meaninglessness, however, since interpreting how hundreds of people may or may not have understood the question, their motives or intentions in answering, etc. All hundreds of which will be different, but you can't know that.
It is possible to do it fairly well for some topics and not have things get to crazy, but unfortunately it gets really close to interpreting chicken entrails. More importantly, almost no one is careful enough when designing or interpreting them, especially academics looking to publish something. Oh, and with small samples. In non random samples of people. All of whom happen to be the sort of person who fills out a questionnaire. And hopefully do so seriously and thoughtfully, even though you won't know if they do or not, and they just want the grade. God help you if they want to "help" the project by giving interesting answers. Or they think they know what your questions are trying to get at, and start responding accordingly. Or... anyone of a billion things.
I hope you are starting to see the problem. Interpreting questionnaires about things like "What cereal would you buy?" is not even straight forward and prone to error, much less "Hey, do you love dictators and boots stomping on people's faces forever?" If there is room for interpretation, you are already in trouble.
"but you can't know that" in the first paragraph should be "but you can't know how". Sorry.
Money quote: The more likely you are to choose "nonstandard" answers, the more mentally ill you will be.
Seems very Foucaultian innit?
Yeah, this is going to come off a little mean, but I'm worried that answering "ambidextrous" on a study is what correlates with being . . . weird. Actual ambidextrous people may not be weird.
Just to be absolutely sure about a couple of things, this isn't an april fool's, right? And we can say all the words in the comments that you used in the post?
Even if it was a 1st April joke, it would be a bad one because there isn't anything special about this kind of absurd study. 100s of them are done every day by desperate bio-psycho-socio-neuro-whatever-phd-students and postdocs.
Hm, OK, will treat it as legit, but only because I trust Scott not to make a joke if he couldn't make it a good one.
+1, sadly. Tons of studies this lame get published....
It's often very difficult to tell if Scott Alexander is creating a 'joke' about his own political beliefs or not;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
The part of the post where Scott says that libertarianism is "against" authoritarianism makes me suspect that this is indeed a joke, though. Or perhaps Scott really is that naive? Kind of hard to tell.
I think it's a "Haha, only serious" bit. He's not seriously delving into the concept of authoritarianism, like the people who've argued that the personality scale is really just "old-fashioned". He's just taking some questions that, on the surface, could be characterized as being related to authoritarianism and seeing what the result was. I do find it interesting that libertarianism & neo-reactionary beliefs had opposite correlations with handedness since the former would also count as a niche viewpoint which would have these kinds of correlations: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/11/black-people-less-likely/
It's strange that all his writings on politics are shrouded in jokes and the like. I feel that Scott Alexander has a big problem straightforwardly and openly stating what he believes.
Also "libertarian" as a political category is not a very good one, neither is "authoritarian".
I think that he didn't take the initial study very seriously and wasn't actually expecting to find significant results.
I may be overanalyzing, but I think that kind of thing happens when you get cancelled for being clear about what you believe.
Writing things clearly and openly should be the aim of Rationalism.
I agree, although Straussians wouldn't.
> I feel that Scott Alexander has a big problem straightforwardly and openly stating what he believes.
I mean, he's already stated explicitly that he has a big problem openly stating what he believes.
Funny this comment coming from someone who's not being straightfowardly stating why he thinks its so wrong to think libertarians tend not to be authoritarian.
It depends what kind of libertarian. I don't think libertarians are as straightforwardly "against" authoritarianism (as vague as both of these political categories are) as Scott does.
Personally, I agree with Scott that's fair to say "without getting into the weeds, libertarianism seems pretty against autoritarianism".
Please, leave it as a disagreement and don't second guess that I'm joking or afraid of stating what I believe.
"It depends what kind of libertarian. I don't think libertarians are as straightforwardly "against" authoritarianism"
essentially that's because marxism relies on selling authoritarianism using libertarian ideals. Your entire worldview falls apart if you're asked to differentiate between liberty and authority.
"The part of the post where Scott says that libertarianism is "against" authoritarianism makes me suspect that this is indeed a joke"
That says more about your worldview than Scott, tbh.
What's the baseline rate of ambidextrous people in the population? Also, is the standard being able to write with both hands equally well? Because that seems like it would be super rare. I have a tendency to distrust self-reports because small children have been telling me they're ambidextrous when they're clearly not.
Did they really need a study to prove that ambidextrous people are more even-handed?
Heeheehee
You, I like you.
> consistently-handed people (ie people who are not ambidextrous)
But what about the ambisinistrous? :D
Ha!
I've heard stories of ambidexterous people being forced to choose one in class by their teachers at a young age. While we're speculating, we may as well speculate reverse causality here.
Maybe being forced to pick a hand is more common in areas where support for auth is high, and that's why the original study found what it found.
Maybe because your data doesn't have so many people from those areas, you can't detect the effect and instead are just getting lizardmanned.
Maybe none of this.
"The paper didn't say exactly where it did the study, but some minimal detective work suggests three sites: the University of Louisville Kentucky, a second university in Louisville Kentucky I couldn't identify, and Schreiner University, a private Christian college in Texas."
Given my consistent-handed authoritarian need for cognitive closure, I'm betting you're correct. Another version of this study https://louisville.edu/psychology/lyle/lab/lyle-grillo-2020 states that:
"The survey was administered to a total of 297 undergraduates who participated in return for course credit. Most (N = 271) attended one of two Midwestern public universities located within ten miles of each other. We made an effort to also sample from a private university in the Southwest but, ultimately, few individuals participated (N = 26 total) and fewer still (N = 17) provided data that met criteria for inclusion outlined later in this paragraph. We, therefore, opted not to include their data in the analysis reported in this paper."
I would imagine the University of Louisville, Kentucky is one of the Midwestern public universities and Schreiner University is the private university in the Southwest. Another public university within ten miles of UL gives Jefferson Community and Technical College (it could also be Indiana University Southeast, but that's fourteen miles away) https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/kentucky/louisville/public-colleges/
So how redneck are they? Well, going by their websites:
(1) UL - hard to say. Sporty? Seem to have a rivalry going on with University of Kentucky?
(2) Schreiner - founded by a Texas Ranger and run by Presbyterians, I guess that answers that? 😁
(3) Jefferson Community and Technical College - seems diverse. Probably mostly practical minded and geared towards "education to get you into a specific job" as well as remedial courses for the less academically-able.
I don't think a "community and technical college" would be described as a "university". When I do a search for "university" on Google Maps centered at Louisville, I find Spalding University ("the most racially diverse student body of Kentucky’s private colleges"), Bellarmine University (which I'm assuming is a private religious university?), and Sullivan University (whose "about us" page asks me what my high school graduate year is and to consent to receive spam if I want to learn about them), as well as American National University (which appears to be focused on continuing education). I'm not sure that any of these is the one.
I looked up "public universities in Louisville" and Jefferson was returned as one amongst the others, so argue it out with whoever did the classification. I agree that Indiana Southeast is probably most likely as the third university here, but that depends how rigidly we are applying "within ten miles" and also the biases of the study creators and what they expected from various college/university populations.
UL doesn't have a lot of rednecks, and I'm mildly offended as a native that Scott didn't do any research before saying that. It used to be a commuter school that had a largely Black student body, and it's true that White Louisvillians tend to associate with UK and Black Louisvillians with UL. The student body is primarily drawn from Jefferson County, which is a D+16 county.
My guess is the local IU Southeast is the most likely other university. Campus to campus is about 10 miles apart as the crow flies. JCTC is a community college, not a university, and the other schools I know of are private.
It’s a prior most people on the coasts have about flyover country.
You have to realize that so many coastal types are so indoctrinated with this prior, they are not entirely responsible for it.
Contra you about this being just a prior: According to https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/49/2016_Nationwide_US_presidential_county_map_shaded_by_vote_share.svg/1280px-2016_Nationwide_US_presidential_county_map_shaded_by_vote_share.svg.png and https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2020/11/17/screen-shot-2020-11-17-at-11.35.01-am_wide-fd53725a515a3575d3312aadd6771c697bd35827.png?s=1400, people in the middle of the US has been consistently voting Republican (which is morally equivalent to being a redneck, I think) in the last two presidential elections.
... with that attitude, they’re likely to keep voting that way.
It’s weakmanning half (or more) of the US.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
Wait how is this weakmanning?
You’re attacking large areas of the US and saying they’re all the same.
The entire point of the post was saying “hey - there are important nuances you’re missing with this generalization”
Then the retort is “well, look how these areas voted for president in 2016 of course they’re morally equivalent to rednecks.”
You do that enough and you’re pushing would-be allies in at least some circumstances in to the arms of the “rednecks.”
There can be Black Rednecks. That's half the title of one of Thomas Sowell's books!
The UL page about "what are the stereotypes people have about UL?" has various student responses and it's tough to interpret how much is tongue-in-cheek:
https://www.unigo.com/colleges/university-of-louisville/reviews/what-is-the-stereotype-of-students-at-your-school-is-this-stereotype-accurate
"From what I have heard the school revolves around sports and academics so I would say the stereotype is Jocks and geeks. I enjoy the school and the environment and I think it is great for just about anyone.
Urban rednecks
The stereotype is that you are either a commuter or an athlete. The commuters generally don't get involved with any of the activities on campus and most of them live at home. You can always pick out the athletes because they have the red adidas backpack with the gatorade bottle. The athletes are really friendly and don't just stick to their friends on the team.
Many people consider the University of Louisville as ghetto, wanna-be college students. This is not true in the slightest. U of L offers a diverse range of people. From wealthy to poor, foreigners to locals, jocks to artists, and everything you may think of. There are tons of groups so every person can find a place to fit in.
In general, students at U of L face the same stereotypes of anyone who lives in Kentucky (that we're all hicks who drive tractors and don't wear shoes), in addition to stereotypes about sports fans (how obsessed we are with beating UK), to give a few examples. There are also stereotypes within campus of other students - the typical nerds, jocks, preps, etc. that are present in just about any setting. And just like any stereotype about any group of people, of course these aren't very accurate. Although I'm sure there are some pretty big sports fans on campus, as well as some people that would be described by others or themselves as "rednecks," these assumptions are not in any way descriptive of every person on campus. People are complex, and take on many varying identities, and to prescribe to stereotypes is to limit people to just a few attributes that make up a much larger person."
That they *have* such a page on their website leads to me suspect they are well aware of the redneck stereotype assumption. But yeah, anywhere outside the Big City/Cities is going to have the same assumptions about rednecks, culchies, hicks from the sticks, e.g. the ongoing 'rivalry' between Dublin and the Real Capital Of Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_(city)
A commuter student is one whose parents can't or won't pay for a dorm room. So they're not rich or upper middle class. And you can't be a "party school" if everyone goes home to their parents every night. So that leaves academics and athletics.
On the other hand, the fact that they're a "university" points away from being working class. I'd imagine the redneck stereotype comes from students at a somewhat fancier school looking down on them.
I’ve become somewhat familiar with Ireland and their history from the Blindboy Podcast. I know lots about Limerick and bits about Cork, Ennius, Kilkenny, Galway, etc.
It does seem that a lot of Ireland does not identify with Dublin as the cultural center.
Also, chicken fillet rolls blew my mind. https://play.acast.com/s/blindboy/chickenfilletrolls
Some of that is okay, but really chicken fillet rolls are (1) a constant topic on r/ireland, see this sample thread https://old.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/kn76lx/whats_your_favorite_stuff_to_have_in_a_chicken/ (2) it's nothing to do with the EU or Europe, it's a follow-on from the breakfast roll which is the food that fuelled our construction boom during the heady days of the Celtic Tiger, see this song about the classic roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIIWKA_h12Q (3) now, the bit about Cuisine de France is sort of relevant - at the very end of the 80s, an Irish company set up to deliver part-baked bread products to supermarket chains, as well as supplying ovens, so that they could produce their own 'freshly baked bread' instore. This made baguettes, petit pains and rolls part of the everyday shopping experience all over the country (and working in a grocery store at the time, it was very effective as the smell of baking bread did make people buy the warm rolls). The French branding was down to the identification with 'going on holidays, eating these products, recreate the experience at home' and the perception of European sophistication, so the podcast is right about that.
As a follow-up to that, expanding the deli counter to be more than "cold sliced meats" meant things like cooking sausages, prepared pies, etc. and offering them for sale. This also meant that garage forecourt shops could get in on the act. Put it all together and it meant that for lunch breaks, your builders, school kids, and people nipping out from the office to get something quick and convenient, could have the experience of a Polish deli counter assistant asking "butter or mayonnaise?" as you took the freshly-baked Cuisine de France roll and had it loaded up with the Irish fry.
The Celtic Tiger got the mange, the good times went bye-bye, the breakfast roll fell out of favour, but eventually some enterprising soul decided to resurrect convenience artery-cloggers by using the breaded chicken fillets and fillings in a roll idea, and behold! the chicken fillet roll was born as an authentic Irish culinary experience!
The third modern Irish convenience grocery store/garage forecourt food is the jambon - and agreed, if done well, it's gorgeous https://www.thejournal.ie/jambon-iconic-moments-4524811-Mar2019/
Writing about Irish cuisine, this is how people used to cook in my grandparents' time, my mother grew up knowing how to cook on these, and as a small child I saw neighbours' houses with the same things: https://www.irishamericanmom.com/what-is-a-bastible/
https://victorianweb.org/technology/domestic/cooking.html
U. of Louisville has been excellent in college basketball for several generations, winning NCAA championships in 1980, 1986, and 2013, and in college football in recent decades.
Kentucky is one of the states that early specialized in basketball, along with Kansas, Indiana, and North Carolina, all of which remain strong in college basketball.
I think the scihub link may be out of date or something, I get redirected to scam sites when trying to visit it.
The .tw domain doesn't work anymore, .do does.
Regarding the lizardman explanation of your results - did anyone claim to be both Marxist and pro-Trump?
One reason I can see that occurring naturally is if they're some form of accelerationist and hoping he'd bring about the End Times more quickly, but that's probably pretty rare.
100% of them are also ambidextrous autistic transgendered.
Before anyone else replies, the above was a joke. I did not actually check the data and discover that superlative percentage.
I thought it was funny.
I've run into pro-Trump Marxists. They're either hardcore tankies who place opposition to US imperialism above all other issues (and think him the lesser evil for his comparative restraint vis-a-vis the MSNBC set, and for advocating peace talks with North Korea), or they're insanely bitter post-leftists.
Do we even know where handedness comes from and why it exists?
Efficiency? I'm just spitballing here... but if I want to be good at something with both hands, then I need to spend more time to train both hands than I would have spent only training one. So if it's a domain where there's no real advantage to being good with both hands, it makes sense to rely on one or the other. And then I assume there is a skills transfer effect which makes it more efficient to always go with one hand or the other. If I've spent time training my right hand at writing, then I go into ball throwing with no experience at all, then very first time I try throwing my right hand probably already has an advantage from it's trained dexterity from writing.
I wonder why animals don’t have have handedness if it’s an efficiency thing
They do: https://www.pnas.org/content/102/35/12634#:~:text=The%20results%20of%20our%20study,%2Dhanded%20for%20wadge%2Ddipping.
“ Based on the classification data, there were significantly more lefthanded (n = 12) than right-handed (n = 4) (z = 2.00, P < 0.05) and ambiguously handed (n = 1) subjects (z = 3.05, P < 0.01).”
I mean, maybe?
Many species of fish show "handedness" or lateralization in tee-mazes presenting as a directional preference, so I'm willing to bet that such traits are relatively ancient/basal and probably broadly present across most tetrapod taxa.
Here is one of among dozens to hundreds of fish studies about this handedness in fish.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393201000343?casa_token=l2_aSY-7b7cAAAAA:8kvMX7dht1KgEFSPkLyWajxbOCEe_XGuO-IwNjrrAwgDSN1FC_yqjA3mugFxeZbj01QYsGIH-w
One hand holds the 'thing' piece of wood say, and the other holds the tool. Knife maybe.
I always say if my left hand ever gets a hold of a knife, it's got lots of cuts to make up for and the right should look out. Why should being ambidextrous have anything to do with closure? I think we have an over abundance of left handed presidents. I don't don't know if that goes for leaders all over time and space. (or is a low number statistical thing.)
Nature and nurture. At least in lobsters; quoting from
http://www.lobsters.org/ldoc/ldocpage.php?did=443:
> By the time a young lobster begins benthic life by settling to the bottom, it has two claws. However, the claws have not yet differentiated into a crusher and seizer. In the beginning, each claw has both fast- and slow-twitch muscle and there is an equal probability of the lobster becoming right or left handed. Claw type is not preordained genetically. Instead, handedness is shaped during the first two stages of benthic life depending on which claw is used the most by the juvenile lobster.
> If a lobster is deprived of sediments in the first juvenile stages, claw differentiation fails to occur and the lobster develops two seizers. By depriving juvenile lobsters of substrate and prodding either one or the other claw on a daily basis, experimental biologists can cause the manipulated claw to become dominant.
I've long been fascinated by handedness and its surprising correlates. For a while I thought about learning to use my left hand more to reap the "benefits," but now I'm pretty sure the causation goes the other way. People with abnormal hemispheric dominance are more likely to have abnormal handedness, but using a particular hand probably doesn't significantly affect the brain.
I'm rubbish at biology though, so I'd love to hear others' thoughts on whether any of this research is actionable.
I tried to do this at one point / still continue to occasionally try :) I now brush my teeth exclusively with my non dominant hand, and it feels very weird to try to use the other one, the way it felt when I switched in the first place.
When I was at uni I got some RSI in my dominant hand so forced myself to write with my weak hand. It was painstakingly slow, but I got ok at it with practice. Tried again a few months later and I'd lost it all.
I remember reading a paper years ago about the link between ambidexterity and schizophrenia. On how schizophrenics where statistically more likely to be ambidextrous. The reasoning presented in the paper was that both brain hemispheres were more connected in ambidextrous people and lead to a higher amount of cross-talk between brain hemispheres which leads to cognition disorders.
However recent googling around is showing that left handed people tend to be more likely to be schizophrenic, not ambidextrous people.
"more likely to support authoritarian governments, demonstrate prejudice against "immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, Mexicans, atheists, and liberals", and support violations of the Geneva Conventions in hypothetical scenarios."
Ah yes, the well known authoritarian position of...... opposition to the Geneva Conventions.
Do the same test but with the authoritarian answers being support for hate speech laws and gun control plus opposition to nuking fascist cities in WW2.
What would be a meaningful definition of authoritarianism?
regarding the trans vs nonbinary thing: sure, in a vacuum, nonbinary more purely corresponds to "failure to choose". But this is confounded by the trans identity being high commitment, while a nonbinary identity can be much lower commitment. Thus you get more people who are only a little bit nonbinary identifying as such, while only those who are really really sure they're trans go through the whole ordeal associated with it (HRT etc).
Yes, my reaction was also... a less diplomatic version of this.
A few random observations:
- I think it's dubious to identify libertarianism as the opposite of authoritarianism. Libertarianism means a desire for less government (unless we redefine words the way Scott did in a recent post... which is fine, but I think most people understand the term this way). Some people want less government because they support the repeal of anti-discrimination laws and the freedom to live in communities defined on racial and religious lines.
- Eye dominance might be a better choice of variable than hand dominance, because it's not easily observable and not subject to social pressure. (I was never encouraged to write with my right hand, but I'm right-handed and left-eyed.)
- My jaw dropped when I saw the post title "Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?" But Scott bounced this off Zinnia Jones, who writes the wonderful GenderAnalysis.net blog, so it's cool.
Depends on how you define authoritarianism, surely. If you define it in terms of political ideas (support for powerful government with a strong leader), libertarians and anarchists (left and right) are surely on the other end of the field from that.
Yes, but (if I understand it correctly) psychologists generally think of authoritarianism as a personality trait rather than a political doctrine, and I think that's what you were going for in your mini-study. A person who wants to discipline his kids by locking them in a closet, and who doesn't want Child Protection Services to bother him about it, might qualify as politically libertarian and psychologically authoritarian.
And there are certainly a lot of Trump supporters who call themselves libertarians. Whether that makes sense as political philosophy is not really the point; even if it doesn't, it still means that self-identified libertarianism won't be a good variable to use.
Baseball season reminds us of the identity-politics group that doesn't bark: left-handers. Why are certain aggregations of once-persecuted people such as blacks or gays so politically potent today, while others such as left-handers can be safely ignored?
It's interesting that handedness is not an important identity politics category. For example, major league baseball has utterly discriminated against left-handed catchers since the 1980s, but nobody cares, other than the sideline fathers of a few stocky lefthanders. I've long challenged baseball experts to come up with the killer reason why there have been no big league left-handed catchers over the last 30 years. They confidently come up with reasons, but seldom agree.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_forgotten_leftists_steve_sailer/
"once-persecuted people such as blacks or gays"
As a left-hander, I have never been discriminated against. I've read about people in the past being forced to write right-handed, but that's totally foreign to my experience. That's why there's no left-handed id-pol. Blacks and gays, on the other hand, still face discrimination today. If you don't believe me, ask them!
Apparently, there was at some point in history some kind of Lefthander Liberation process in which Americans stopped trying to make lefthanded kids write righthanded.
If we had a Lefthander History Month, we could watch a Ken Burns documentary on PBS about how oppressed lefthanders once were and the brave souls who battled for their right to be who they are: lefthanders.
But virtually nobody cares about this forgotten history. In general, handedness doesn't make for galvanizing identity politics, although I don't have a General Theory of Identity Politics that explains perfectly which traits will be organized around and which won't.
Left handers who want to be baseball catchers are a tiny number of people. Plus, the sport overall likely can't be said to discriminate against left handers since being left handed is at least favorable for pitchers and first basemen. Those tend to be more of "glory" positions than catcher, so without polling all the world's children, I would guess more left handers who want to play baseball have an advantage rather than a disadvantage since more of them are likely going to want to be anything other than a catcher.
For what it's worth, my dad was a catcher and I kind of wonder why anyone would do it voluntarily. It's a miserable position that destroys your body compared to any other position you can play.
The situation of lefthanders in baseball is like that of blacks in football. And yet, even though blacks in football, like lefthanders in baseball, are vastly over-represented compared to their share of the population, we are frequently lectured on how the NFL needs more black quarterbacks and coaches, even though they are represented at least as well as their share of the national population. In contrast, nobody had ever brought up baseball's discrimination against lefty catchers as a social justice issue.
My broader point is that it's interesting which traits make for strong identity politics and which don't.
Guys play catcher because A. You can get to the big leagues without being able to to run fast or hit super well. B. Because it's a miserable position that destroys your body compared to any other position you can play, and some guys like being man enough to it.
Ambidexterity is used to include folks who are cross dominant (prefer a specific hand for different functions.) Given that this category is never noted, we don't know how many ambidextrous identifying people are actually cross dominant, which seems to me relevant to the possible correlations posed here.
Anybody know if there are relevant correlations with cross dominance (ie left handed, right footed, and vice versa) and ambidexterity?
"Need for cognitive closure" sounds like a more specific/complicated version of "satisfaction with/tendency towards local maxima", and a bit too anthropomorphic at that.
Trans (incl non-binary, which is generally also trans. Bisexual isn't 'can't choose', but rather 'won't choose') today requires high activation energy to overcome a strong local-maxima of "probably cis". This matches the observation that trans (indeed all LGBTQ) identification is increasing in cultures that are reducing the gradient for escaping the "you're cis/straight/etc" local-maxima. If people remain ambidextrous despite the general gradient towards favoring development of one side over the other, we should expect them to similarly be more resilient to being boxed into the gender they were assigned at birth. With the same activation energy, someone resilient to gradients would be more likely to transition.
I think it's the same for any heterodox exploration/development, including the self-actualized authoritarians within largely non-authoritarian demographics.
Maybe it's an interesting speculation that tendency to follow gradients is protective against mental illness. Follow the gradients that everyone else follows, and maybe you won't hit the activation energy for something bad like "maybe the voices in my head are real and dire warnings".
I am however concerned that my model here seems to answer these questions *too* readily, which is always suspicious.
The striking thing is that bisexuals & transgendered now both outnumber lesbians in the youngest generation. A gay man & lesbian discuss that here:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/video-with-katie-herzog-on-the-expansion
Yeah, it's weird how similar their arguments are to those deployed against gay and lesbian youth back a generation or so ago. Everything old is new again! Except me, dammit, I'm still as decrepit as ever.
A lot of Glenn Greenwald's argument is about how he was gay & restricted by society back then and he isn't going to have some johnny-come-lately in a marriage that was always legal teach him how to suck the eggs of resistance to the cisheteropatriarchy. But I guess that could be compared to certain radical tendencies of gay politics who disagreed with Andrew Sullivan when he popped up arguing for gay marriage.
Fascinating - I love these kinds of posts.
But I wonder if what's actually being found here is a general factor of *self-identification* as weird, unique, non-conforming, etc.
Imagine two people who are both above averagely dexterous with their non-dominant hand, both moderately gender non-conforming, and both nerdy and socially awkward, but one is the type of person who likes to think of themselves as weird and unique, and the other isn't. The first will describe themselves as ambidextrous, transgender, and autistic, while the second will describe themselves as none of the above; hence the correlations.
So ambidexters are Trump-supporting Marxist neoreactionaries. I always suspected it...
*statistically more likely to be
(also remember Lyle and Grillo 2020; maybe this is just a SSC thing)
"Second, a question asking respondents to rank their support for more open immigration, on a 1 - 5 scale. I figured that was a fair proxy for prejudice against immigrants, Mexicans, and Muslims."
I have a problem with applying the label "prejudice" to an opposition to open borders that is often based on lots of relevant evidence, such the awareness of racial disparities in IQ, FBI crime statistics, income, taxes paid, welfare consumed, propensity for scientific achievement, etc. It reminds me of creationists calling scientists' aversion to creationism a "prejudice" as if the scientists hadn't come across any evidence against it.
I'd like to see a pro-immigration guy sit down and calculate how many utilons more open immigration would provide for the existing inhabitants of the US and their posterity, taking into account the decline of average IQ, reduced per capita tax receipts, increase in crime for the 2nd+ generation, and so forth.
I'd guess from international HDI and IQ comparisons that life is at least 10% worse for each 5 point drop in the national average IQ, so if a country with a population of 330M and an average IQ of 100 brings in an extra 20M people with an average IQ of 85, the new average IQ is 99 and life is 2% worse for the 330M and their posterity indefinitely. Total cost over the first century is 660 million QALYs. Maybe it's partially a one-way ratchet where a high national average IQ can set up institutions that the country can continue to benefit from after the IQ drops, up to a point, but if it goes even lower those institutions break down.
This reminds me of project prevention, which is a charity that's probably even more cost-effective than malaria prevention, because it pays underclass drug addicts to partake of long-term contraception, to prevent low IQ unwanted children from being born. The math above works out such that preventing an IQ 70 kid from being born is worth about 60% of a QALY per year forever for everyone else, assuming he would have reproduced at about replacement. If there's no discount rate because future people's lives are as important as our own, then the positive utility of preventing that birth is infinite, if we ignore the singularity or other hypothetical discontinuities. Infinite utility for $1000 seems like a good deal. It probably ought to be discounted by the probability of some kind of future discontinuity in the utility of the national average IQ, though. Strong AI might make it irrelevant in 40 years. But as a precaution we should be reluctant to rely on some hypothetical future discontinuity. The uncertainty around when strong AI will happen is very large. It might be a century or two. Or we might never even get there due to an idiocracy scenario. Dysgenics is an existential risk to our potential to invent strong AI and colonize the galaxy. If we get dumber we'll continue using up the earth's resources without accomplishing any technological progress.
Not sure why the effective altruism community doesn't put more effort into eugenics, other than the taboo.
I didn't become an immigration restrictionist until I realized when I was 40 in 1999 that mass immigration was, on the whole, bad for the left half of the bell curve of my fellow American citizens. So, it can't be said to be prejudice in my case because I was mostly pro-immigration up through my cancer in 1997, at which point I decided to become a full time intellectual and started intensely studying up on social issues. I founded an email group in 1999 that included superstar intellectuals (e.g., two members subsequently won Nobel prizes) and, somewhat to my surprise, discovered that the immigration restrictionists had the best of the arguments.
Bryan Caplan's short book on open borders tackles these criticisms, you can decide if he's convincing
Typo: "If you have high need for cognitive closure, you seek out information that disagrees with you." -- "high" should be "low"
Fun fact: since "dexter" just means "on the right" and "ambi" means "both" "ambidextrous" means "right handed with both hands."
That sounds like a kind of reactionary brag: "I'm so rightist both my hands are right hands".
This is the reason I hate the fact that I can't like comments anymore
The 2020 SSC also had all of these questions, so you can check if it replicated.
Although presumably a lot of the same people taking both surveys, so not that independent a replication.
Out of an abundance of caution I will slightly obfuscate a certain word, beginning with N, which was filtered on the old site. The thing about this speculative analysis is that Novoreactionaries are not homogeneous, and those who post here or who posted on SSC are less likely to conform to the stereotype of "need for cognitive closure". You have the Blut und Boden adjacents, who don't post here (or who post until banned, I guess?). You have the amerikaners, who are off doing amerikaner things. And then you have the other guys. I know for a fact that Curtis "M*ldb*g" Yarvin reads this stack, because he posted about it a few weeks ago. I take it that everyone agrees that he is comprehended under the "N" word at issue? Here's a bright idea of his that he recently advocated: monarchy with adoptive trans-Salic succession. That is, every monarch must be a Queen, every Queen must be a transwoman, and each Queen *adopts* Her successor. Say what you like about this, but I don't think it bespeaks a "need for cognitive closure". And even if you think he was just joshing your shorts, that per se shows a certain ambiguity that could easily correlate to hemispheric non-dominance, ambidexterity, blah-de-blah. Bottom line: novoreactionaries who post here are just like other TRUE weirdos: they screw with your statistics. On a personal note, I consider myself strongly right-hand dominant, but a few weeks ago I started learning guitar. What struck me was how well my non-dominant hand can master things – it's just a matter of practice. I suspect that a considerable part of ambidexterity is determined by willingness to practice with the so-called non-dominant hand, and that eventually this may even lead to gross changes in brain morphology. The causation is just too complicated to tease out with blunt instruments like the political ones used here.
Adoptive dynasties is how the Roman emperors often did it. I believe in Japan there was also a tradition of adopting people who were already adults because of that norm of having an heir.
Oh yeah, Yarvin is explicitly drawing on those historical precedents.
From what I've read, Japan has a lot of family-owned businesses, and they *currently* have a custom of adopting adult men into those families.
Supposedly there is a successful inn in Japan that's been in the same family for 2000 years, but presumably that's because of adoption of the best employees.
"Here's a bright idea of his that he recently advocated: monarchy with adoptive trans-Salic succession. That is, every monarch must be a Queen, every Queen must be a transwoman, and each Queen *adopts* Her successor"
Damn it, that's so brilliantly bonkers that it overcomes my ingrained "not an inch" tendencies and makes me smile, so well done!
Greg Cochran used to suggest schizophrenia was pathogenic due to clustering of births in certain months, but now he thinks it's like low IQ: lots of rare deleterious genes of very small effect presumably due to mutational load and not any kind of alternate "strategy".
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/strategies/
"Strategy" vs. "Mistake" is an interesting contrast.
Being persistently nonbinary might be linked to lower need for cognitive closure than being trans, but it's widely observed that trans people tend to don a nonbinary identity before deciding that they're trans, as a kind of stepping stone. Without looking at any data, I bet there there's more of these people who are nonbinary as a stepping stone to being trans than there are persistently nonbinary people, and that that genre of nonbinary person is likely to have greater need for cognitive closure than someone who jumps into being trans right away, while someone who ends up persistently nonbinary has less need for gcognitive closure than either of the other categories.
Katie Herzog (in the Blocked and Reported podcast) speculated, based on people she knows, that 10 years ago teenage girls attracted to other girls would identify as lesbian. But now they tend to identify as nonbinary. In which case, I would expect gay and nonbinary to have similar need for cognitive closure. It's just current social conventions that influence the choice between lesbian or non-binary identity.
In Herzog's conversation with Glenn Greenwald (which I linked in another comment here), it was noted that the overwhelming majority of self-identified bisexuals (who also tend to be disproportionately young & female) who were in a relationship/married said they were with an opposite sex partner. So an extrapolated future might consist of men divided into gays & straights, while women are divided into bi & nonbi :)
She also said in that interview that women tend to be closer to the middle of the Kinsey Scale than men. So that makes me wonder if there's a statistically significant difference between men and women in any of those measures of need for cognitive closure.
I'm not sure what cognitive closure has to do with it. (besides this post) Biologically, two women (getting some sperm here or there.) is a viable way to have a family and pass on your genes... Given brutish men, it might even be selected for genetically. (Is it terrible for me to ask if lesbianism is passed down genetically?)
Yes, the original post was about need for cognitive closure correlations. If it correlates with sexual preference then it may correlate with the Kinsey Scale. And if it correlates with Kinsey Scale and if gender correlates with the Kinsey Scale, then that makes me wonder about gender and need for cognitive closure.
A simple model is that men pursue mating opportunities with women, and women choose which ones to accept. I know William Buckner (@Evolving_Moloch) disagrees with that because frequently women didn't have a choice, but it fits things like how males tend to advertise how humorous they are and women prefer man based on that, like mating displays seen in other species. So if women evolved to evaluate people pursuing them, there might not actually be as much selection for sexual orientation simply because there wouldn't have been as many women doing that in the past. Whereas if men evolved to look around and pursue someone they find attractive, they could more easily waste time on a dead end without that sort of filter.
I am really tired of these "measurements of authoritarianism". I'm going to try and avoid politics, as much as possible, and just criticize these methods. For example, they say that supporting Trump = supporting authoritarianism.
Now I've written a couple of posts saying Trump was better than those opposing him. For example, that H.C. bringing back Kissinger, friend of tyrants all over the planet, made her utterly unacceptable. And that the deep state - the American national security apparatus - had done worse things that Trump was capable of, such as ratting out Nelson Mandela to the Afrikaner cops, murdering Patrice Lumumba and supporting the overthrow of democratic regimes all over the planet. Does that qualify as support for authoritarianism?
(Yes, yes, I support Trump out of my respect for Mandela - trust me the irony, no, insanity, of that statement is not lost on me)
And what about all those who supported him out of 4chan style nihilism - 'for the lulz' or simply out of a visceral desire to 'burn it all down'? (Incidentally, the one promise he came damn close to fulfilling). That's anarchism, literally the opposite of authoritarianism.
I just want to highlight the problems of these polls and this measurement.
I referenced the critique of "authoritarian" personality scales as really just picking up more old-fasioned personalities elsewhere in this thread. Here's a post on that idea: http://www.econlib.org/the-old-fashioned-personality/
These measurements are thought to correlate with authoritarianism, not necessitate it. So they assume a person who supports Trump is more likely to support authoritarianism in general, but that doesn't imply everyone who suppors Trump is more authoritarian than average. Opposite examples existing doesn't disprove this correlation.
I, too, am focusing on the specific issue and ignoring the politics here.
Again, how does one measure these? Sure you can say my views on Kissinger & the CIA place me in the minority - but the whole "fed up, not taking it anymore, just smash everything" is much, much more distributed among Trump supporters. Heck, it's practically the whole energy of the movement.
When I think of "authoritarian personalities", I think of people who like authority and want more of it. That can either be in the lurid form - e.g. "Bronze Age Pervert", and the rest of the Pajama AltRight crowd - or in the form of just wanting 'sensible' regulation that 'gets stuff done'. I don't think of people who just want to torch the whole system as having failed.
Do you have dates for all of those events? Because it's my understanding that the Deep State hasn't been a thing since the 70s.