And, again, socio-psychological facts like character assessments are precisely those for which we have the _most_ reason to distrust each other's judgement: if I like Mary, I might say favorable but false things about her even if I would never tell a lie about homotopy groups. In the absence of a objectively calibrated compassion-o-meter, psychological scientists who want to study individual differences in compassion are mostly limited to doing statistics on people's verbal self-reports and other-reports—but if you don't trust what people _say_, it's at least not _obvious_ whether or how much more you should trust statistical analyses of what people say, in accordance with the ancient dictum: ["garbage in, garbage out."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out) Probably the neuroscientists are working on the compassion-o-meter, but they too face the problem of ensuring that their interpretations of their brain scans actually mean what they say they mean.
+
+Jensen—
+> the test must measure, in addition to the construct it purports to measure,
+some other characteristic or factor that is completely uncorrelated with the construct and on which the major group, on the average, exceeds the minor group A typical example is the case in which the major and minor groups differ in their native language. A person’s native language is presumably not correlated with the construct of intelligence. If the test involves the native language of the major group exclusively and the minor group has a different language, the test will most likely be positively biased in favor of the major group. In other words, the test is measuring something (in this case a specific language) in addition to the construct that it purports to measure, which condition favors the major group
+
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Intelligence_Test_of_Cultural_Homogeneity
+
+Draw-a-Horse Pueblo
+
+> That is, the order of item difficulties should be expected to differ between racial groups.
+
+> the items that discriminate most between whites and blacks are the same items that discriminate most between older and younger children within each racial group.
+
+> In general, for children and adults alike, it is found that those test items that best discriminate individual differences in general mental ability among whites are the same items that best discriminate differences in general ability among blacks, and they are also the same items that discriminate the most between whites and blacks.
+
+> Gordon and Rudert (1979)
+
+> The effect of black dialect as compared with standard English on the IQs of black lower-class children was investigated in three studies by Quay (1971, 1972, 1974), who had the Stanford-Binet translated into black ghetto dialect by a linguistics specialist in black dialect. No significant difference (the difference actually amounts to less than 1 IQ point) was found between the nonstandard dialect and standard English forms of the Stanford-Binet when administered by two black Es to one hundred black children in a Head Start program in Philadelphia (Quay, 1971).
+
+> For example, in the United States only about 9 percent of physicians and dentists are women, whereas in the Soviet Union the figure is close to 50 percent.
+
+
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This was the linkpost description text I initially drafted, before deciding that the "Straussian coyness" I [occasionally]() [succumb]() to is ultimately unbecoming.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff