What are /r/badscience's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> If you can accept that Muslims are inherently violent, uncivilized, brain deficient, unintelligent, etc then

This is an extreme misrepresentation. His position is that many of the ideas of Islam (as well as those of most mainstream religions) are potentially or likely dangerous, such that they can lead good people to do bad things. What else explains the majority of suicide bombings (within the last few decades) being committed by jihadi groups?

edit:

>... Harris' inherent anti-theism.

Also, fun fact, did you know despite being an "anti-theist" (a label he would likely disagree with), he has spent much of his life studying Eastern religions directly? He's a proponent of many Eastern meditative practices, as well as a borderline Buddhist. He's also co-authored a book with a Muslim.

Largely the answer is no, 'breeds' tend to have a fair amount of genetic differentiation caused by artificial selection that causes a larger amount of unique genetic variation. If one were to calculate the Fst (which is just a ratio of unique genetic variation of a certain subpopulation and the total genetic variation of the entire sampled population e.g. how much genetic variation unique to Dacshund compared to all dogs) you'll find much higher Fst values for, say, dog breeds than for humans.

This paper in humans puts Fst topping at around .11 and that's the amount of variation within caucasian populations, not beteen caucasian and another population! Where as this paper for dog breeds (And just Finnish dogs at that) has much higher Fst values.

One other thing to remember is that 'breed' isn't a well defined, or even used, taxanomic classification. When it comes to organizing the relatedness of organisms we never use a concept like breed.

> I wonder if I can get linked to /r/badlinguistics[1] for pointing out that the plural of genus is 'genera'.

Both are acceptable forms.

Merriam-Webster

Oxford (American)

Insisting that there's literally no data, while demanding access to something he can plug into excel and evaluate that will give him an absolute, certain "yes/no" answer is what boggles me.

First, I know damn well there are large data sets available. Someone else mentioned a very large NOAA data set that. My quick query found many others, so what is he on about? The problem isn't finding where the data are, it's what the data mean.

Is there one he could play with in Exel? I was dubious, but it turns out that there's an open source dataset with an API, so I suppose he could code something up. (Or e-lance a solution.) But then what? Develop a model? Without relying or referring to the current state of the art? You have to understand the nature of the problem, and it frightens me that I sincerely may understand it better than he does, and I'm a mathematical illiterate.

My understanding is that we are talking about chaotic systems - which I would think someone doing Econ would know at least something about, at least conceptually - and unless I'm very much mistaken, you don't expect to get absolute certainty from a simulation of a chaotic system. You get trends and increasingly refined approximations. He seems to fundamentally misunderstand climate modeling, while stating qualifications that should make him at least able to comprehend the sorts of answers you would expect to get, because economies are a similar sort of problem.

Am I wildly wrong here myself? Is he actually assuming that of course the data are being used to support an underlying belief structure about how climate works because he thinks that's the way it has to work?

Not by default, no. Many scientists work at JPL, as do a great many non-scientists.

Nye's work at JPL, per his c.v.:

>Design Team member, MarsDial on board the Mars Exploration Rover, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology; conceived idea and assisted in design, vibration analysis, and public outreach

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarsDial

That is engineering, not science. Engineers take scientific knowledge and use that to build better things. Science goes out and gets that knowledge. There is occasionally some overlap (engineering research), but I don't see anything on Nye's resume indicating that he has done this.

He's a competent engineer, though the engineering portion of his c.v. is quite short because he went off to be an educator, write books for layfolk (mostly kids), etcetera.

It's not a diss to him to say that he is not a scientist. Scientist isn't the be all and end all of things. It's often useless without engineers to apply the facts to the real world. Science is often unable to be furthered without the support of engineers as well. None of that makes them scientists.

> There are Roman (Italian) genes in the UK. There are Scandinavian genes in the UK.

All European populations contain variants from other populations as a result of the out-of-Africa bottleneck and isolation by distance. The distribution of variants don't matter. You can't root these groups biologically, they have to be understood socially. There's no trace of Roman control, no separation of Roman and non-Roman citizens, no hierarchy. This isn't like the situation in the US, or South America, or Australia where the invading society still exerts control over the inhabitants. Australians identify as Australians, and distinguish themselves from Aboriginals. They have subjugated aboriginals and eliminated aboriginal autonomy and those effects still resonate today. This paper makes further arguments for why Roman colonialism cannot be understood in parallel terms with Industrial and modern colonialism. It's also important to understand that that Roman empire dissolved and its political structures eliminated, while the US political structures still exist to this day.

>Are you suggesting British people who are not majority Celtic blood should move to Italy or Denmark or wherever?

Leaving the land isn't necessarily a part of decolonization and "giving the land back". Ceding control and autonomy of the territory is. People don't need to leave for that to happen. For example, just emigrating somewhere doesn't make you a colonist. Colonialism is about seizing control and subjugating the local population.

>This Marxist obsession with race and grouping people by ethnicity so you can fucking purge people who you deem undesirable is sick and exactly what the Nazis were doing.

There's nothing remotely Marxist about that and that's not what I'm doing. Also the Nazis were doing something very different called fascism which is radically different from Marxism and communism.

> It's not intracellular communication, as you've suggested in para 1,

I didn't say intracellular, I said intra*cortical* quoting you. Again, you said functions are underlain by intracortical neural pathways rather than centres, but those areas in the cortex (or "centres" as you call them) are only made-up of neurons and neural pathways. Maybe I am just dense, but you keep bringing up this distinction between the two views, but you never explain how it is more than just explaining the same phenomenon at a micro rather than macro scale.

>nor is it basically just a paraphrase of the idea of functions being localized in centres, as in your para 2.

Localized literally means limited to an area. You talk about highways and functions who have a distribution that is not global across the brain. Even if it didn't match up with the cortical function map shown in undergad psych classes, this is still a form of localization since your pathways still occupy a restricted space.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/localization

At this point I think we should just call it a day, I have other things to do.

edit: let's just be happy we didn't anything badsub worthy ;)

IQ tests are still widely used in psychometrics, which is one of the best replicated subfields of psychology, and are well respected by the relevant researchers. One kind of evidence that intelligence is a singular thing is that cognitive scores from different kinds of tests correlate highly with each other. The multiple intelligences theory of Gardner, on the other hand, has no evidence to support it and intelligence researchers do not generally believes it. IQ also correlates with a ton of stuff we care about, e.g., academic success, job performance, income, life expectancy, and a ton of other stuff. If you'd like to learn more, Intelligence: All That Matters is a very good non-technical introduction.

P.S. I haven't watched Shaun's video (yet), but I think it's better practice to cite scientific criticisms if they are available.

I know there’s a paper where they show a triangular PCA with Africans, Europeans, and Asians and then another one where they also include Indians, which bridge the gap, anyone know it?

There’s also the 23andme blob showing what happens to the gaps when you have many populations.

Bud, I only referred to OP (the belief that there is a large racial intelligentce gap due to genetics betweenn the races). This is referred to as Hereditarianism, and isn't racist, just like race differences in skin colour aren't racist. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Fallacy-of-Equating-the-Hereditarian-Hypothesis-Carl/e2176981ff0b666257729f9f3bf042c9828d22ee

Thanks for that. This site is being posted a lot, exclusively by right wing types. Thought it odd how completely anonymous this "covid analysis network" is, and how this is only ever posted by hcq evangelists. Why are they so hellbent on promoting this? Got banned in /r/conservative for posting these debunking links alongside it:

https://www.newsguardtech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/COVIDAnalysis.pdf

https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2020/09/fact-check-no-massive-international-study-shows-countries-with-early-hcq-use-had-79-percent-lower-mortality-rate.html

Another sign of bad science. Real scientists and engineers use Comic Sans

I just decided to amazon check "Nikola Tesla" and apparently he wrote an autobiograpy on his inventions

​

https://www.amazon.com/My-Inventions-Autobiography-Nikola-Tesla/dp/1452880956

​

and it's a short read. 96 pages

>You keep making up what your own citations say, and ignoring what mine say.

My citations fully supported everything I said. Yours (the one you had) were flawed as I have shown

>You start BSing when I catch you in simple numerical errors - like when you claim that the correlations are all in the .8-.9 range and it was contradicted by your own source.

This is not the case, as I already explained. See the " The Wicherts paper is a generational comparison, completely besides the point of what I said. It's BIASED. Learn this. If you want to learn about inter correlations among tests, read Cattell's bible of factor analysis: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Human-Cognitive-Abilities-Factor-Analytic-Studies/dp/0521387124 " part.

>Good day. We can revisit this when you take a beginning stats course.

Right, thanks for conceding after I refuted your bogus claims.

> Hierarchical models in statistics are something completely different.

Irrelevant. I am talking about hierarchical models of intelligence. I have explained to you what they mean.

> If you want to prove a theory, you use statistics.

I proved "my theory". My theory has been proven since at least 1993 or since Spearman.

> I take it you don't read your own citations?

I sure have.

> The highest correlations between the different tests in your Wicherts paper was 0.76,

This is not the case buddy. The Wicherts paper is a generational comparison, completely besides the point of what I said. It's BIASED. Learn this. If you want to learn about inter correlations among tests, read Cattell's bible of factor analysis: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Human-Cognitive-Abilities-Factor-Analytic-Studies/dp/0521387124

> Well, that's certainly not true. Flynn didn't make up his data, for example. There are also scoring methods going back well before 1980.

That is true. That's simply the data they used. If you think there is data that shows the opposite go ahead and show it to me. I did not claim Flynn made up his data, neither did my source. You are making shit up yet again.

> What was your sample representative of?

Races in the US.

> Great! Show a paper that uses this analysis in a study that adjusts adequately for confounding factors.

You have to show confounding factors are relevant first. I walked you through how to do this. Scientists cannot account for something the existence of is at best unproven and at worst implausible. As I already taught you, the only reasonable possible confounder of admixture analysis is through skin colour. This is not the case. See the sources I already posted.