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1. lain (lain@lain.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 03:36:59 JST lain
   Morton’s analysis of the skulls, wrote Gould, suffered from a variety of inconsistencies. He split up the groups arbitrarily, for instance reporting results for some subgroups of the White skulls, all of which had high averages, but not doing the same for some subgroups of Native Americans who also had large skulls. [...] There was also a discrepancy between the measurements made with seeds and those made with the more reliable lead shot – and this seed-shot discrepancy was larger for Black and Native American skulls than it was for Whites, implying that the seed mismeasurement occurred selectively. Gould later suggested a ‘plausible scenario’ for how this happened:Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum [the hole at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord enters] with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.4In so doing, Morton would have made the skulls from the White populations appear larger than those from non-Whites. Indeed, all his errors moved the results in that same direction. The mistakes, as Gould put it, reflected ‘the tyranny of prior preference’: that is, Morton’s assumptions about White superiority.5 If you analysed the data properly, there were only tiny differences between the skulls of the ethnic groups – certainly nothing upon which to build a racial hierarchy. This was no isolated story. The same lessons about the effects of bias, Gould said, likely applied right across science: ‘I suspect that unconscious or dimly perceived finagling, doctoring, and massaging are rampant, endemic, and unavoidable in a profession that awards status and power for clean and unambiguous discovery’.[...]The idea that every scientist has an ideological perspective that affects their research brings us back full circle to the case of Samuel Morton and his skull measurements, and the criticism of his biases by Stephen Jay Gould. In 2011, the anthropologist Jason Lewis and his colleagues went back not just to Morton’s numbers, as Gould had, but to the actual skulls from his collection at the University of Pennsylvania, remeasuring about half of them with modern techniques.110 Lewis and his team agreed that Morton’s ranking of the different groups of people was obviously racist, and confirmed that he did indeed make measurement mistakes. However, they contended, the errors weren’t systematic in the way Gould had argued: instead, the mismeasurements were present across many of the skulls and didn’t seem to favour one racial group over another. They could also have been due to an assistant who Morton mentions as having made errors, rather than to Gould’s ‘plausible scenario’ about Morton stuffing more seeds into the White peoples’ skulls.Furthermore, Lewis and his team argued that Morton simply hadn’t manipulated the sample groupings (omitting to mention groups from non-White races with high average skull sizes) in the way Gould had charged. In fact, Lewis and colleagues alleged that Gould made his own mistakes, splitting up Morton’s sample in ways that suited his preferred beliefs about the equality of the skull sizes. In the foreword to his book, The Mismeasure of Man, Gould had freely admitted to having a strong commitment to social justice and liberal politics.111 The Lewis paper concluded that ‘ironically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results’.112Those were fighting words. Could it really be true that a legendary analysis by as well-respected a figure as Gould could be so wrong? Not everyone thought that Lewis and colleagues’ case was a slam-dunk. The philosopher Michael Weisberg, while accepting that the new skull measurements were correct and agreeing that Gould had fumbled some of his analyses, argued that the main thrust of Gould’s argument was still valid.113 The idea that an assistant might have innocently made some errors was just speculation, after all; the evidence was still consistent with Morton (or perhaps the assistant) being biased against giving non-Whites larger skull sizes. And after the mistakes were corrected, there was still very little difference in the skull sizes by race, which was the main thrust of Gould’s critique. A final twist (for now) came in 2018, when some additional skull measurements made by Morton himself were rediscovered. When these new data were taken into account, the idea that the discrepancy between Morton’s seed-based and shot-based measurements was larger for disfavoured racial groups, which formed a large part of Gould’s case for Morton’s bias, no longer held water.114
   • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;; (shmibs@tomo.airen-no-jikken.icu)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 03:36:57 JST バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;

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     @lain both seeds and shot too small to hold water anyways. need finer soil for capillary action
   • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;; (shmibs@tomo.airen-no-jikken.icu)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 03:37:11 JST バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;

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     • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
     @lain too granular rather; sorry
   • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;; (shmibs@tomo.airen-no-jikken.icu)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:36:40 JST バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;

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     • polarisera liked your post
     @polarisera @lain yeh, computers are fake
   • polarisera liked your post (polarisera@gleasonator.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:36:41 JST polarisera liked your post

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     @lain I read it, pretty lame actually. As another author once stated, most academics don't have the guts to go after the real issue, and that final chapter is always "We can fix this, we can do better next time."The entire premise that academic science is self-correcting and progresses toward truth is a lie not supported by evidence. But they can't give that up.
   • lain (lain@lain.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:37:24 JST lain

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     • polarisera liked your post
     @polarisera cute animal fallacy
     バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;; likes this.
   • polarisera liked your post (polarisera@gleasonator.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:37:25 JST polarisera liked your post

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     @lain Cartoon dogs sell
   • lain (lain@lain.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:37:26 JST lain

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     • polarisera liked your post
     @polarisera reading through this one at the moment: https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B08MBFCP57/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o05?ie=UTF8&psc=1
     バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;; likes this.
   • polarisera liked your post (polarisera@gleasonator.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:37:27 JST polarisera liked your post

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     @lain
   • lain (lain@lain.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:37:28 JST lain

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     • polarisera liked your post
     @polarisera i still liked it just as a treasure trove of all the bad things that happen in academic science, i kinda forgot what 'solution' the author had but i think i didn't care much
   • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;; (shmibs@tomo.airen-no-jikken.icu)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:38:52 JST バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;

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     • polarisera liked your post
     @polarisera @lain can't think of what outside forces there might even be
   • polarisera liked your post (polarisera@gleasonator.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:38:53 JST polarisera liked your post

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     • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
     @shmibs @lain Are you suggesting you have evidence supporting the claim that academic science is self-correcting, and not reset by outside forces?
   • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;; (shmibs@tomo.airen-no-jikken.icu)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:39:18 JST バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;

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     • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
     • polarisera liked your post
     @polarisera @lain other than money but
   • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;; (shmibs@tomo.airen-no-jikken.icu)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:39:53 JST バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;

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     • polarisera liked your post
     @polarisera @lain > claude shannon rides a unicycle around> non-academic
   • polarisera liked your post (polarisera@gleasonator.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:39:54 JST polarisera liked your post

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     • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
     @shmibs @lain Bell Labs?
   • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;; (shmibs@tomo.airen-no-jikken.icu)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:50:57 JST バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;

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     • polarisera liked your post
     @polarisera @lain bell labs was the academic ideal, smart people + rooms + a few people to chase goals and a few to screw around doing whatever, and anybody can talk to anybody else. and it failed as soon as money and business got involvedwright brothers and the other inventor-age guys had relatively low-hanging fruit that can be solved with fewer brainsand say eintstein is outside academia when he writes joint paper and spent his time talking to academia-types is kinda eh (though he was consensus-antagonist, which is usefulpeople start "outside academia", forming as a person reading stuff from academia and having some cool ideas. then they join it and have conversations with smart people who think differently and revise those ideasstuff gets done when people communicate lots and openly, try to be rigorous, and have freedom to look new things. and those things breaking down in uni-land recently because dollars incentivise fighting, credential glut, and lies
   • polarisera liked your post (polarisera@gleasonator.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:50:58 JST polarisera liked your post

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     • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
     @shmibs @lain Wright BrothersTesla
   • polarisera liked your post (polarisera@gleasonator.com)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:50:58 JST polarisera liked your post

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     • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
     • polarisera liked your post
     @shmibs @lain Einstein, Ramanujan, technically Bose, Boltzman and a host of others were outside academia, which quickly re-writes history. A hypothesis with shit for evidence.
   • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;; (shmibs@tomo.airen-no-jikken.icu)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 04:51:47 JST バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;

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     • バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
     • polarisera liked your post
     @polarisera @lain same tesla and so; impenetrable market until an idealist comes along to head things who isn't money-brained