Links for March 2024

Genetics, Rockets, Chatbots, Wokeness, Suicide, Comics

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Now some items of interest from around the web:

Science Marches On

At Unsupervised Learning, Razib Khan reflects on how the rapid advance of genetics has forced many revisions to theory in a short span of time.

I have been wrong about big questions in this field so many times already in scarcely a quarter century of post-collegiate life….

Below are some key cases in the field where I can look back and say I stand corrected, sometimes even just a few productive years later.

Examples include complications to the “Out of Africa” story of human origins, the shift away from looking for single genes of large effect, and the discovery that modern humans do indeed have substantial Neanderthal ancestry.

Also regarding genetics: Criminologist/sociologist Callie H. Burt has a new piece out in Sociological Methodology to guide non-experts (re: most sociologists) in understanding polygenetic scores: “Polygenic Indices (aka Polygenic Scores) in Social Science: A Guide for Interpretation and Evaluation.” The link is to an ungated version available through her website.

As for being wrong: When I first starting teaching research methodology as a grad student, I used the “hot hand” example from Thomas Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. Basketball players and fans think a player is more likely to make a shot after he has recently made another shot — when he has the “hot hand” that leads to a winning streak. Gilovich said this wasn’t true and held up the belief as an example of how people misperceive streaks in random sequences. Randomness doesn’t look random to human eyes — a person looking at the results of a coin flip can easily fool themselves into thinking heads and tails run in streaks or obey some other more complicated pattern.

Only statistician Andrew Gelman recently reviewed the theoretical reasons and empirical evidence that the hot hand actually does exist! He claims that its existence wouldn’t even be controversial except that Gilovich’s mistaken work on the subject came first.