Besides, you are just letting your majorinumericonomrative bias show.

I know that’s a silly comment on a weighty issue, but it irked me.

I would have been happier with wrapped danishes, if they were the cheese kind.

I need to grocery shop, but when I get back I will write a rather more thorough post about this paper and ignorant asshats who can’t fucking read. I did already write about the awesome 12 hours on the road with an eight year old and a two year old – including on the fly repairs in the middle of nowhere, in Ohio. Goodtimes…Goodtimes…

I just wanted to jump in to ask that “neuro”guy shut the fuck up with your pretentious use of a handle that implies you know fuckall about science. Specifically that you know anything about social sciences. You don’t. This is shown clearly in your ignorant fucking commentary about this paper and rather pisses me off. Politics != science, no matter how “sciency” you try to sound.

Both you and “Chuck” need to re-read the paper, then ask a relatively clever child to read the paper and explain it to you.

Chuck, this would be an example of where you are annoying. Read above and beyond and around the cited sentences. For instance, about the work in the Netherlands comparing native Dutch to Turks and Yugoslavs, and in Israel, and so on.

Dear reader: I apologize that you had to read these comments. Chuck and Neuroguy are members of the pro-race based thinking (a kind way of saying “racist) mafia, and they (as well as a hadful of others) make it their business to find blog posts that criticize racist psychometric research and load the blog posts up with relevant looking comments that are 90 percent distortions. I think there are a couple of people who might want to read these comments so I’ll leave them up for a couple of days, but I’m obligated to take them down eventually.

Second, as I said above to NeurGuy, the paper is indeed available. Your characterizations of both the paper and my comments are pretty much fantasy. I can’t see anything you’ve said that is worth responding to other than “do actually read the paper and the post”

And when you do read the paper, read all of it. Where you see something that I’ve said that you think isn’t in there, I assure you that there is indeed a problem, but it’s your reading comprehension that is at issue.

And, finally, do read the policy I have on this blog about anonymous people using this as a place to deposit your racist garbage. I’m going to think about what to do with your comments, and I may simply decide to just delete them. I have a hard time sustaining the argument that your comments are any kind of valid attempt to understand or agrue a point.

And, again, I see nothing in a moderately quick read of your comments that tells me anything other than that you are making up the contradictions you are claiming. If this paper was of limited access we’d have a serious problem here of intellectual honesty, but since people can read it for themselves, it is not that serious.

I’m pretty sure that both you and “Neuroguy” only read the press release and the abstract. Bad form, Lesacre. I mean Chuck.

From reading your comments I guessed, and it is only a guess, that your intention is to obfuscate the nature of the original paper and my post about it. The clues to this include your restating what the original paper had said and in your immeidate accusation that it is all political. Those are typical elements of the pattern to which I refer.

Had I had the sort of conclusive idea that you demand in your second comment, I would have simply deleted your comment and banned you from the blog. But I was not sure if you were being evile or sloppy, and chose to give you a chance.

No, it isn’t. I’ve read the entire paper. The paper is mainly about demonstrating lack of sufficient power to detect slope effects in the previous research. The authors do this very well. Lack of sufficient power in previous studies however does not constitute evidence they exist.

Try reading the entire paper.

This paper is available for anyone to read….No, it isn’t,

Yes it is.

I think this may be at the heart of the problem. You are reading some other paper.

Some of your comments are even more off.

Greg said: “First, the authors of this article do NOT claim that there are slope effects in the absence of evidence for slope effects.”

The authors do not claim that their is a slope bias in absence of evidence because they do not claim there is one. They claim that a slope bias cannot be ruled out and they suggest that such a bias is, in their view, likely. Their methodological reasoning for the likelihood of the bias is pretty much the same as the methodological reasoning for the likelihood of genetic based population differences in intelligence — once the possibility is show, what are the chances of there being none?

Greg said: “Actually, the bias, remarkably, works no matter who is in the majority. This is one of the interesting things in the paper….”

The authors suggest that there might be a predictive slope bias against Blacks and Hispanics, given their sociohistoricalâ?? cultural and social psychological particularities — particularities which do not generalize. (And yes, Neuroguy’s point is valid — To quote:

“The expectation that there are slope-based differences across groups is not based on differences in socioeconomic status but, rather, on sociohistoricalâ?? cultural and social psychological explanations. Next, we provide examples of the types of mechanisms that may cause slope-based differences across ethnic-based groups.”

The examples given don’t generalize. Jews (as we both know) and East Asians do not appear to suffer from them; why would you suppose whites would, (especially from b?):

a. “Members of the minority group interpret discrimination against them as more or less permanent and institutionalized and developâ??a folk theory of getting ahead which differs in some respects from that of Euro-Americansâ?

b. “Moreover, there are family and community pressures to not â??act Whiteâ? (in the case of African American communities) or â??act gringoâ? (in the case of Latino communities).”

c. “Social psychological explanations for why slope-based differencesare expected across groups rely on the stereotype threat literature”

Basically, the authors think it’s likely that there will be a slope bias. And they think it’s likely the bias will be against Blacks and Hispanics on the basis of a-c — reasons that already have been trotted out a million times (but fail) to explain the test score gap. Regardless, there is no reason to think this would generalize.

Your title and statement above grossly misrepresents the article. Nowhere do the authors suggest that “intercept-based differences (actual overall mean differences) in performance on tests ‘… are smaller than they are believed to be or even nonexistent …'” or that “ethnic differences in test performance may be entirely an artifact of the method used to ‘adjust’ the test.” NOWHERE.

What the authors are talking about is predictive bias, which is a function of test scores and test validity. Under the current model, research shows that test scores over-predict school/career performance for Blacks and Hispanics. That is, Blacks and Hispanics perform worse than their test scores predict, relative to whites. According to the authors this predictive pro-bias, which is based on intercepts, may not exist. To quote:

“In spite of these established conclusions there are many reasons…why intercept-based bias favoring minority group members may be smaller than it is believed to be or not exist at all. Regarding the finding that no differences in slopes exist, Monte Carlo simulations and literature reviews have revealed that conclusions regarding the absence of slope differences across groups may not be warranted.”

They say NOTHING remotely to the effect of “test performance may be entirely an artifact of the method.” In fact, they note that the differences in test performance between groups contributes to the likelihood of predictive bias.

In addition to saying that the predictive (intercept based) pro-Black/Hispanic bias might not exist, the authors suggest that there might be a predictive bias based on slopes. To add to your above quote:

“For the second analysis, for which there is a difference of only .01 in validity coefficients across groups, we also used a desired selection cutoff of 0 for the criterion as input in the Aguinis and Smith (2007) calculator. Errors due to using a common regression line instead of the subgroup-based regression lines would lead to 18.02% of false positives for the African American group and 14.4% of false negatives for the White group. Given the sample sizes, about 1,134 African Americans (out of a total of 6,296) would be incorrectly offered employment and about 2,451 Whites (out of a total of 17,020) would be rejected incorrectly.”

They give reasons why there might be a predictive slope bias against Blacks and Hispanics (what happened it Asians?), but, of course, there might instead be a slope bias against whites. Either way, the paper did not directly concern mean test scores or impute that “ethnic differences in test performance may be entirely an artifact.”