Notices by lain (lain@lain.com), page 40
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@polarisera cute animal fallacy
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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
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@shmibs @rin history of the worldyear 1: rubik's cubeyear 1800: bookyear 1830: opiumyear 1960: video gameyear 20XX: gf
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<-- full of poismell
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@shmibs the rapture took him
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Nice
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@shmibs lil tired zzz
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#cofe
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@Hyolobrika @silverpill the art of any picture can be "set free" by taking a picture
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Can animals sin?
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Got some candles from my parents
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@shmibs impfpflicht
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@kaia I did an audio drama of this for latin class once
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@shmibs @icedquinn @Moon @lelouchebag look, 2022 you'll read less soil books and i read less economics books, deal?
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@Moon @icedquinn @lelouchebag slavery isn't a very efficient system, especially if slaves could have run away to the union from the confederacy and be free, something that wasn't possible when all states were part of the union.
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trump was the only president BRAVE enough to say "merry christmas", repeat if you love CHIRSMAS
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@xenmen @duponin I use colemak and I'm the best person so
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Family guy is just Anna Karenina for boomers
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@shmibs Europa?
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I think Osaka people would go to Austria and Tokyo people would go to Switzerland
lain
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