Oct 18
tomUncategorized
…I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change: nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed.
David Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part 4, Section 6, ‘Of Personal Identity’
Dec 24
tomUncategorized
Baby, I’ve been waiting,
I’ve been waiting
Night and day
I didn’t see the time,
I waited half my life away
There were lots of invitations
And I know you sent me some,
But I was waiting
For the miracle,
For the miracle to come
Waiting for the Miracle, Leonard Cohen
Sometimes I don’t know where this dirty road is taking me
Sometimes I can’t even see the reason why
I guess I keep on gamblin’, lots of booze and lots of ramblin’
It’s easier than just a-waitin’ ’round to die
Waitin round to die, Townes Van Zandt (and the Be Good Tanyas)
Oct 23
tomUncategorized
It might be the case that, while exploratory factor analysis isn’t a generally reliable tool for causal inference, for some reason it happens to work in psychological testing. To believe this, I would want to see many cases where it had at least contributed to important discoveries about mental structure which had some other grounds of support. These are scarce. The five-factor theory of personality, as I mentioned above, is probably the best candidate, and it fails confirmatory factory analysis tests. As Clark Glymour points out, lesion studies in neuropsychology have uncovered a huge array of correlations among cognitive abilities, many of them very specific, none of which factor analyses predicted, or even hinted at. Similarly, congenital defects of cognition, like Williams’s Syndrome, drive home the point that thought is a biological process with a genetic basis (if that needs driving). But Williams’s Syndrome is simply not the kind of thing anyone would have expected from factor analysis, and for that matter a place where the IQ score, while not worthless, is not much help in understanding what’s going on.
…
The psychologist Robert Abelson has a very nice book on Statistics as Principled Argument where he writes that “Criticism is the mother of methodology”. I was going to say that such episodes cast that in doubt, but it occurred to me that Abelson never says what kind of mother. To combine Abelson’s metaphor with Harlow’s famous experiments on love in monkeys, observational social science has been offered a choice between two methodological mothers, one of the warm and cuddly and familiar and utterly un-nourishing (the old world of linear regression, analysis of variance, factor analysis, etc.), the other cold, metallic, hurtful and actually able to help materially (statistical methods which are at least not definitely unable to do what people want). Not surprisingly, social scientists, being primates, overwhelmingly go for the warm fuzzies. This, to me, indicates a deep failure on the part of the statistical profession to which I am otherwise proud to belong. It is never a good sign when your discipline’s knowledge is the wire-mesh mother all the baby monkeys avoid if at all possible. Less metaphorically, the perpetuation of these fallacies decade after decade shows there is something deeply amiss with the statistical education of social scientists.
Cosma Shalizi, ‘g, a statistical myth’
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