> The unfortunate echoes of this slant towards eugenics are heard today in the names we use for many statistical concepts, such as:
> Regression: What we call “linear regression” today was named for an observation that genes “regressed” to some average. It was a way of saying, “don’t mix with those people, or your children will regress and make society worse for it.”
> Correlation: Literally from co-relation, or how related two “desirable” traits were in a population. You might guess which traits eugenicists thought made one desirable.
This is another entry to go along with "The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against", isn't it? Science isn't making enough progress for people to differentiate themselves by their research, so we'll start throwing people out for not keeping up with intellectual fashions like the sociology professors do.
“The term "regression" was coined by Francis Galton in the 19th century to describe a biological phenomenon. The phenomenon was that the heights of descendants of tall ancestors tend to regress down towards a normal average (a phenomenon also known as regression toward the mean).[7][8] For Galton, regression had only this biological meaning”
I bought the book and I’m not sure where those other quotes originated
““A few years after publishing his initial findings, he coined the more general term correlation (originally co-relation) to refer to the association of any two variables that tended to go together, such as a person’s height and their shoe size, and he provided a formula for correlation that would reproduce his “coefficient of reversion” from the heredity studies.”
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I haven't read this particular book but enjoyed "The Theory that would not die"[1] which also details the historic conflict between frequentists and the bayesian statisticians. Not sure which is the better book but "The Theory..." has a lot more Goodreads ratings than this one.
Bernoulli's Fallacy is pretty new though, it was originally published (hardcover) in August 2021. Which likely explains why GoodReads has more ratings, since it's barely been a year yet and books like this aren't exactly the mainstream vogue.
Thanks for the recommendation though, I'll (eventually, backlogs are a disease) have to add it to my collection.
> Regression: What we call “linear regression” today was named for an observation that genes “regressed” to some average. It was a way of saying, “don’t mix with those people, or your children will regress and make society worse for it.”
> Correlation: Literally from co-relation, or how related two “desirable” traits were in a population. You might guess which traits eugenicists thought made one desirable.
This is another entry to go along with "The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against", isn't it? Science isn't making enough progress for people to differentiate themselves by their research, so we'll start throwing people out for not keeping up with intellectual fashions like the sociology professors do.