Rejections redux

So in a previous post I described how two papers I previously submitted to two different Elsevier journals (Intelligence and the Journal of Criminal Justice) were rejected, both within 24 hours. But there are other articles I have submitted to reputable journals too, all of which have now been rejected, indicating I clearly have to be more attentive to detail and meticulous before I try doing this again. Anyway, I wanted to update my readers on what has happened with the other submissions (some of this was also stated at the bottom of the old post, linked above).

Earlier today (7/24/2018) I got a rejection email from Personality and Individual Differences (about state IQs). I have also had another paper rejected by Intelligence (which was a meta-analysis of the black-white mean IQ gap, and which is different from the rejected paper mentioned above and in the post from this May) and yet another (about the validity of FS/S, a widely used gun ownership proxy) that was rejected by Crime & Delinquency. So that's a total of 5 rejections. I'm 0-for-5, baby! No but seriously I clearly have to learn a lot more about these subjects and especially how to organize a scientific paper before trying this again. But I have every intention of trying again at some point.

That is all.

The story of His Excellency, a banned Wikipedian

His Excellency was a user who was highly critical of Wikipedia's purported anti-Muslim bias. He was put on something called "personal attack parole" in a 2006 arbitration case (mostly courtesy-blanked and the old page was deleted from the history, but it can still be viewed here*). Later the same year, this was upgraded first to a 4-month ban after violating said parole, apparently by making anti-Semitic attacks on other editors, after which he was placed on a year of probation. On 3/14/2007, he was indeffed for "multiple cases of IP socking and harassment".

Timothy Usher, a linguist at the Santa Fe Institute, was also sanctioned in the aforementioned arbitration case. The Committee found (in a 6-1 ruling) that "Timothy Usher has engaged in incivility and edit warring regarding Islam articles. In particular, he has personalized the conflict and engaged in harassment of His excellency." He later returned as Proabivouac (misspelled at this link for some reason). Under this username, he was emergency-banned and indeffed by ArbCom on 10/19/2008 for "long-term disruption". The block log for that day reads "Consult ArbCom privately for any discussion of this block; do not unblock without ArbCom's permission".

*Note that this is a very old version of Wikipedia saved in the Wayback Machine so it looks like shit and there's basically no formatting, as is usual for such old captures of Wikipedia pages.

A human BG debate: can it happen?

I am trying to organize a debate about human quantitative behavior genetic studies and whether they are fatally flawed or not. Originally it was just supposed to be about classical twin studies, but then I decided, why limit the scope to that? It's not like human BGists* only ever do such studies- they have plenty of other research designs (reared apart twins, families, adoption, etc.). So I decided I'd start emailing people to ask if they'd be willing to participate in a one-on-one debate about whether human BG studies have value or are totally worthless. Here I will be listing everyone I've emailed to ask about this potential debate and their responses (if any).

1. Robert Plomin (BGist) - Automated email reply saying he'll be "away from the office with only sporadic email contact until 15 July 2013." Yes, seriously. He hasn't updated his email in FIVE YEARS!!!
2. Jay Joseph (critic) - He responded the same day! He said "I might be interested in a debate, depending on how the details work out. But this Saturday is too soon, as these things require much more time and planning...Thanks for your interest, and please let me know what develops as far as a debate is concerned. For several reasons, I doubt that many twin researchers would want to debate me."**
3. Irwin Waldman (BGist) - He responded the same day! He said yes, but that he's on a family vacation now and won't be able to participate for a week or so.
4. Evan Charney (critic) - haven't heard back yet

Notes

*My abbreviation for "behavior geneticist". Hope it catches on.
**I did mention maybe doing it this Saturday in the first email I sent Joseph, when planning of this potential event was still even more tentative than it is now. But now it is obvious that will definitely be too soon, for 2 reasons. One is that as Joseph pointed out this takes a lot of time to plan successfully-way more than just a few days. The other is that as I note below Waldman won't be able to debate for like a week, and he might be the only BGist I can get to represent the field, so picking Saturday is a bad idea for that reason too.

Wikipedia and the United States: a comparative case study

This is based on a comparison I first thought up about 4 years ago and briefly posted about on Wikipedia (in the Village Pump for proposals, to be specific). *cringes internally with embarrassment thinking about all the shitty ideas I proposed back in 2014 on Wikipedia that were overwhelmingly shot down*

...anyway, as I was saying, here's the analogy. Kind of like Mad Libs or a choose-your-own-adventure story, you have two options for each choice (each of which is in parentheses). The first option applies to Wikipedia and the second applies to the United States.

Once upon a time, a small, brave group of Americans (Jimmy Wales & Larry Sanger/the Founding Fathers) were tired of living under the tyranny of British rule (Encyclopedia Britannica/King George III), and so decided to create their own (encyclopedia/country): one that would be defined by freedom from an oppressive bureaucracy that exerted total control over what people could (read in encyclopedias/do or say). So this group of brave freedom-fighters (all of whom happened to be white men, not that that has anything to do with anything) founded their (encyclopedia/country), dubbing it (Wikipedia/the United States of America).

As implied in the fact that this (encyclopedia/country) was founded in response to a desire for freedom from the total control of an oppressive oligarchy, its main founding principle was that of liberty. Specifically, the (encyclopedia/country) was dedicated to the ability of anyone to (edit/pursue happiness in) it as much as they wanted, and to do so without the oppressive interference of a handful of (Encyclopedia Britannica expert editors/British leaders), who had unfairly denied them a voice in their own (encyclopedia/government).

Of course, this ideal of complete freedom wouldn't last long, despite its noble intentions. So while the (encyclopedia/country) initially had very little in the way of an organized (bureaucracy/government), such a system later needed to be created. Elements of the organized (bureaucracy/government) that controlled basic features of the (website/country) included the (Arbitration Committee/Supreme Court), which consists of (thirteen/nine) judicial decision-makers who get to issue binding decisions affecting all the (editors/citizens) of the (website/country). The (Arbitration Committee/Supreme Court) mainly aims to interpret established (Wikipedia policy/legal precedent) in the context of a specific case appealed to it. O

Other key components of the structure of (Wikipedia/the United States) include (Jimbo/the President), a figurehead who mainly acts to represent the entity rather than actually make key decisions about how it should be run, and (Admins/Congress), a group of officials elected by the (editors/citizens) of the (website/country) at large to do the "dirty work" of running the whole thing.
There are also other bureaucratic elements to (Wikipedia/the United States), including the punishment for breaking (policy/the law), which is (being blocked/imprisonment)--potentially indefinitely, if what you did was bad enough.

Some thoughts on "Misbehaving Science"

Recently I created an article on UCLA sociologist Aaron Panofsky on Wikipedia. I had previously created an article about his 2014 anti-behavior genetics book, Misbehaving Science, in May. I haven't read the entire book, but I have read reviews of it and bits and pieces of the book itself on Google Books preview (so really just a few pages at the beginning, until I get the "you have reached your viewing limit" message and can't keep reading). So you should take what I'm saying about this book with a grain of salt.

With that significant caveat out of the way, I will begin discussing this book now. The book is a sociological study of the development of the field of human behavior genetics over time, with a specific emphasis on the many highly controversial findings that have been reported in this field. The main argument of the book appears to be that in human BG, unlike in "real science" that is working like it's supposed to, controversies are never resolved, and rancorous debate over fundamental issues keeps persisting for many years. Thus, the book's title refers to a type of science in which results of studies are so inconsistent that no one can come to a clear conclusion about anything, partly because of "anomie" (lack of clear guidance) in the field (which would mean, I guess, that human BG researchers don't have clear or specific "rules" about how to conduct their research the "right way").

You'll notice I specified "human BG" when summarizing the book above, and that's because the human stuff, obviously, is more interesting, controversial, and is more discussed in the book. No one other than scientists who actually research animal BG really gives a shit about its results, except insofar as they apply to humans, which is only slightly. But human BG is really interesting and relevant to hot-button issues, so the media loves to publicize its findings. The most obvious example is the "gay gene" study published by Dean Hamer et al. in 1993. The study concluded that there was a link between markers on the X chromosome and male homosexuality. Of course, its results were not replicated despite the huge amount of media attention they got at the time.

So why does controversy keep resurfacing in human BG? One possible answer is that no one can advance the field's knowledge by replicating results, and the same research designs are used over and over to produce statistically random results based on bogus assumptions. Another possible answer is that BGists intentionally make provocative claims without caring about whether they are scientifically responsible, just so they can get media attention and increase their "scientific capital" (Panofsky looooooves this phrase for some reason). Misbehaving Science appears to endorse both of these answers. It appears that the picture he paints of human BG is one in which a controversial claim is made, other scientists try to replicate it, they fail, and then the cycle starts all over again.

Why Lee Jussim is wrong about stereotype "accuracy"

It has long been fashionable for academics pushing right-wing views to claim that they are merely trying to pursue honest, objective science and bravely standing up to the academic establishment--one which is invariably assumed to be composed of liberals whose views are based on their political ideologies rather than on scientific evidence. Recently, Rutgers psychologist Lee Jussim has been playing this game with respect to the specific subject of the "accuracy" of stereotypes. He claims that stereotypes are generally very accurate, and that there is a widespread assumption in both academia and the general public to the contrary that is simply objectively false (e.g. Jussim, Crawford, & Rubinstein 2015). 

That's right, a professor at a prestigious American university actually wants to hold up people's beliefs about entire groups of human beings as being highly accurate representations of reality. So many obvious questions abound: is Dr. Jussim saying that black people are lazy violent criminals who always eat fried chicken and watermelons, and that Asian Americans are bad drivers who are good at math, and that women love pink things? After all, these are all stereotypes, and he is saying that many stereotypes are very "accurate". So it follows that many stereotypes that people are very familiar with, and often highly offended by, must be very "accurate", according to Jussim. This would, one imagines, include some or all of the stereotypes mentioned above. But to be fair, let's look closer at Jussim's argument before painting him as some sort of racist/sexist simply for trying to legitimize people's intergroup beliefs. After all, maybe the really offensive stereotypes like those previously mentioned are also the ones that aren't accurate (not least because they can't really be accurate: see below).

So what's wrong with this line of argument? First of all, it assumes that people's beliefs can accurately be represented in quantitative terms. Before explaining why this is a highly problematic assumption, I will explain how researchers in the past have assessed the (in)accuracy of stereotypes. As Jussim himself wrote in 2012, "There are many different ways to test for the accuracy of stereotypes, because there are many different types or aspects of accuracy.  However, one type is quite simple -- the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria.  If I believe 60% of adult women are over 5' 4" tall, and 56% voted for the Democrat in the last Presidential election, and that 35% of all adult women have college degrees, how well do my beliefs correspond to the actual probabilities?  One can do this sort of thing for many different types of groups." 

In other words, asking people what % of members of group B (hereafter simply B) have characteristic X, and comparing it to the actual %, assumes that the answers to the % question will accurately represent how people normally perceive others as a result of holding stereotypes about the groups to which they belong. That is, such an approach to assessing the "accuracy" of stereotypes assumes that people's beliefs are statistical (e.g. 30% of B have X) rather than generic (all B have X). But this assumption may be wrong.

Another problematic assumption inherent in any claim that stereotypes are to some degree accurate is that stereotypes contain content that can be accurately operationalized in a way that conforms to reality. That is, the "stereotype accuracy" argument assumes that a stereotype being described as accurate is the result of things that members of the group to which it applies actually do. But of course, there are some stereotypes that, by their nature, certainly bear no relationship to objective reality. For instance, if it is believed that African Americans are apelike and mentally inferior to white people, then this is a stereotype that clearly cannot be assessed on its (in)accuracy, insofar as "inferiority" and the state of resembling an ape are both entirely subjective characteristics. Notably, this is clearly also true with respect to many other characteristics of stereotypes, many of which (e.g. laziness, athleticism, etc.) Thus such stereotypes cannot be the result of an accurate perception of reality, but must instead be artifacts of prejudice or other cognitive biases. 

But the biggest problem by far with claims of stereotype "accuracy" is that they ignore this point: Most people in a group won't fit the stereotype, however accurate it may be. By this I simply mean that if the stereotype is that members of group B are X, researchers like Jussim who want to play up its accuracy will frame it as "(Number) % of members of group B are X" or "members of group B are (number) % less likely than members of group A to be X". Then the number in these formulations can be compared to the actual quantity to assess how "accurate" the stereotype is. In reality, however, my point is that even for the most "accurate" stereotypes, the stereotype will actually be highly inaccurate in that most people in group B will not be X. As we shall see, this point is a lot less controversial than you might think. 

The examples given by Jussim of the % of women who voted Democrat or are more than 5' 4" tall seem of little or no relevance to actual stereotypes people actually hold about groups. What about more abstract and common stereotypes of women, like that they are more emotional, accommodating, and better equipped to do housework than are men? Is this actually true of most women (to the extent that such a question can even be answered objectively)? Fundamentally, the problem here is that even the most "accurate" stereotype will often lead to conclusions that are not just wrong, but highly offensive, when used to make judgments about individuals. 

Consider the conclusions Jussim et al. (2018) have recently reached on this subject, namely, that "race, gender, and age stereotypes tend to be moderately to highly accurate." What does this mean? Does it mean that judgments based on stereotypes of someone of a given race/gender/age will usually be correct? What % of the time will such judgments be correct? 

To their credit, Jussim et al. appear to anticipate this obvious criticism, writing (p. 7), 

This line of reasoning’s suggestion – that all stereotypes are inaccurate because most members of a group fail to fit a stereotype – is partially justified. It is true that most members of a group will fail to perfectly fit a stereotype. This, however, does not mean that the stereotype is inaccurate. To understand why requires understanding how this reasoning confounds two different levels of analysis and how considerably greater conceptual clarity can be brought to understanding stereotype accuracy by clearly distinguishing among these levels of analysis. [Emphasis mine.]

So there it is: the emperor has no clothes! They admit the obvious fact that most stereotypes aren't really accurate in the sense that people can't use them very accurately to make individual level inferences. What does this mean? Among other things, it means Jussim et al. acknowledge that most blacks aren't athletic or lazy, and that most Asians aren't bad drivers but good at math, and that most women aren't emotional and submissive, and that this holds for all other stereotypes as well. But the fundamental point is that stereotypes are oversimplified because they attribute the same characteristics to all members of a group, which leads to inaccurate conclusions most of the time, because such an attribution ignores that most people in the group don't have those characteristics. This is the basic shit about how stereotypes have long been defined that Jussim and his colleagues love to bitch about, yet in the above passage they admit that it's actually true--but, but, it, uh, doesn't count as real accuracy!

Here's how they dismiss this problem later in the same paper (p. 9):

Absolutist stereotypes – beliefs that all members of a group have some attribute – will indeed almost always be false, because there are almost always wide variations among individuals. A single exception invalidates an absolutist belief. Just as a belief that the temperature in all locations in Alaska is always below freezing will be disconfirmed by a single reading of 33 degrees Fahrenheit in Juneau on July 15th at 1pm, a belief that all Germans are efficient will be disconfirmed by discovery of a single inefficient German. The vast accumulated empirical evidence on stereotypes, however, has yet to report a single person who holds absolutist stereotypes. Instead, the evidence indicates that most stereotypes are quantitative and probabilistic, not absolute (Citations omitted).

Really? Most stereotypes are in the form of quantitative values? Most people's stereotypes are that a given percentage of members of group B have trait X? That seems quite hard to believe, since even most statisticians, much less normal non-experts, think in quantitative terms on a regular basis in their day-to-day lives. Aside from being contradicted by the Hammond et al. paper I previously cited in this post, the claim that most stereotypes are quantitative, not absolute doesn't appear to be well-supported by the sources cited. The Hammond et al. study aimed specifically to assess the cognitive structure of stereotypes, but the 3 sources cited by Jussim et al. (2018) did no such thing. For instance, McCauley & Stitt (1978), one of these 3 sources, just proposed "...a quantitative and individual measure of stereotyping, based on defining stereotypes as probabilistic predictions that distinguish the stereotyped group from others." So they defined stereotypes as probabilistic rather then empirically demonstrating it, so that clearly doesn't support Jussim et al.'s views at all. What about Judd et al. (1995)? This study assessed white and black Americans' stereotypes of each other's groups. The study aimed "...to examine theoretical issues in stereotyping and to describe the current state of ethnic interrelations among young people." Their findings were: "Throughout, the samples of African Americans demonstrate interethnic judgments that are consistent with existing work on stereotyping and ethnocentrism. White American students, however, reported judgements that replicate neither the out-group homogeneity effect nor ethnocentrism." So...white people don't perceive black people (the out-group) as all being similar (homogeneous). But black people do hold such perceptions of white people. Interesting, but doesn't support the claim about most stereotypes being non-absolute. Lastly, there is Swim (1994), which "assessed the accuracy of people's stereotypes about gender differences in 2 studies by comparing perceptions of sizes of gender differences with meta-analytic findings." But this obviously assumes that numerical answers given to researchers' questions about "what percent of women have college degrees" or other such questions are accurate reflections of stereotypic beliefs.

I will close by quoting some important points previously made on this subject by Ryan (2003), who made several observations very similar to those I make in this post: 

"The stereotypes that women are passive or that Blacks are athletic, for example, are no doubt erroneous if they are meant to imply that all women or all Blacks are so. And on what basis would one determine the actual passivity of women or the actual athleticism of Blacks anyway? Further, the notion that stereotypes can be accurate seems to imply that group attributes should be applied to individual group members so long as those attributes (or stereotypes) are accurate. This implication seems highly offensive in a society that values the individual and his or her unique merits." 

A true "WTF" moment...in an academic journal

It is very rare for me to be reading an academic journal article and read something that makes me think "What the fuck are these author(s) talking about?" But this has just happened to me when I was reading this paper about biosocial criminology, written by many of its key proponents. 

Just a brief recap: biosocial criminology is a stealth and, so far, disturbingly successful attempt to smuggle genetic determinism into the field of criminology, all the while employing the age-old behavior genetic style of "hitting-them-over-the-head" and accusing their critics of having an ideological opposition to any potential role of genetics/biology in human behavior. In reality, of course, genetic determinists, whatever they may want to call themselves, simply ignore obvious facts like the fact that, as Sir Michael Rutter put it, "genes do not, and cannot, code for socially defined behaviors" (quoted in Charney 2008). Crime, of course, is a socially defined behavior, one which is categorized as crime by subjective, socially constructed criteria. Thus, the same behavior (like violence) is considered crime in some contexts, but not in other contexts (like war) (e.g. Rosenfeld 2009).

Anyway, the moment that I thought was really weird in the paper I was just reading (Beaver et al. 2015) is shown below in bold in the quoted passage from this paper (note: all quotes taken from other sources in this post will be in Arial):

"When the biosocial perspective began to emerge, and biosocial criminologists began searching for biosocial samples that could be analyzed, the Add Health was an obvious choice. The reason is because it is genetically informative, as it includes kinship pairs along with specific genetic polymorphisms. As a result, this sample represented the key dataset that was used (and that continues to be used) by biosocial criminologists. Once biosocial criminologists began to use the Add Health on a widespread basis, a criminological witch-hunt ensued. The Add Health was made to seem as though it had fatal flaws, and some journals, such as Crime and Delinquency, created editorial policies barring any more studies using the Add Health from being published in the journal. Other biosocial critics have argued that biosocial criminologists have overused these data and there simply is nothing else that can be offered from them. Such a view by criminologists is, of course, nothing more than dressed-up rhetoric, particularly when considered against the fact that (1) there are more than 10,000 Add Health users (certainly not all of these are biosocial researchers) and (2) that the National Institutes of Health just awarded the Add Health a $22.7 million grant to collect a fifth wave of data on the Add Health participants. Against this backdrop, outside of biosocial critics, it does not appear that experts in other fields view the Add Health as only being used by biosocial researchers, as being dried up, or as being unimportant." [Emphasis mine, needless to say.]

Yeah, I thought the use of the phrase "witch-hunt" by Beaver et al. (2015) was very strange in a peer-reviewed journal. I mean, it's not new for these researchers to label their critics as ideologically motivated-in fact, the very same paper includes quotes like this: "...some reviewers are ideologically opposed to biosocial research and thus, employ virtually any tactic to provide a harsh critique of the submitted manuscript". But that's nothing compared to this quote from the same paper: "Certain journal editors, for instance, view themselves as gatekeepers of knowledge and strategically prevent biosocial studies from being published in their journals. In order to maintain the guise of being fair and impartial scholars, they hide behind the review process as though it obviates them from being biased against certain bodies of research or from stamping out studies submitted for publication by biosocial criminologists."

Where was I? Oh yeah, the "witch hunt" thing. So as I was saying, biosocial criminologists have giant persecution complexes and love to attack their critics as ideologically/politically motivated, but even by this standard, accusing their critics of an organized "witch hunt" against them seemed pretty weird, to put it mildly. 

What's the context? They're talking about the Add Health dataset, which they note has been used for non-biosocial criminological research for many years already. Biosocial criminologists tried to use this dataset to assess the role of genetic factors in criminal behaviors, because, as Beaver et al. (2015) (hereafter B15) themselves note, "...it is genetically informative, as it includes kinship pairs along with specific genetic polymorphisms." So what is the pushback they're complaining about? Well, the main criticism of the use of Add Health data for "genetically informed" research in criminology seems to have been made by Burt & Simons (2014), who wrote the following:

"...of the identified 20 criminological twin studies published since 2008, 17 used the Add Health data. We do not argue that the genetic twin sample in the Add Health is deficient; indeed, the quality of the data seems to be extraordinary (Harris et al., 2006). We do believe, however, that reproducing findings of similar heritabilities for various criminal‐related traits on the same set of 289 MZ and 452 DZ twin pairs is problematic. Moreover, this means that most recent heritability estimates in criminology have been based on the same imperfect measures (self‐control, delinquent peers, delinquency, and victimization) that are available in the Add Health data."

That's one component of the criticism of genetic research based on Add Health. There's also this complaint B15 make: "...some journals, such as Crime and Delinquency, created editorial policies barring any more studies using the Add Health from being published in the journal." I found this claim hard to believe, so I searched the archives of Crime & Delinquency for any editorial statement even mentioning Add Health (aka the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, formerly known as the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health). I found none, but I did find papers using Add Health data that have been published in this journal in this year (e.g. this one and this one). So clearly, any "policy" such as the one B15 claim existed in C&D does not exist there anymore, assuming that it ever did.

Basically, criticism of one's research, even if it includes attempts to prevent the publication of studies that tell us nothing we do not already know, should not be dismissed as an ideologically motivated "witch hunt". Unless of course you have no stronger, scientifically grounded argument with which to defend yourself.