Asymptotic Philosophers

A philosophy of science blog

All posts tagged psychometrics

The genetics of what?

Posted on Author KinoPosted in Philosophy of Science, Scattered Plot
Kino
Kino
Kino specializes in the philosophy of statistics and its application in the social sciences. She looks at the methodology of social sciences in general but psychology in particular through the lens of data analysis. Kino posts under the banner "Scattered Plot".
Kino
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A while back, I wrote a blog post about a GWAS (Genome-Wide Association Study) on the genetics of educational attainment. I mentioned how it was interesting that it was a GWAS on “educational attainment” rather than “intelligence” because, while the two seem closely connected in many people’s eyes, the latter appears more like the sort of…

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Is philosophy a talent field?

Posted on Author KinoPosted in Life in Academia, Scattered Plot
Kino
Kino
Kino specializes in the philosophy of statistics and its application in the social sciences. She looks at the methodology of social sciences in general but psychology in particular through the lens of data analysis. Kino posts under the banner "Scattered Plot".
Kino
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I haven’t been posting much, partly because I’ve been busy with job applications. Today will be a short one. As I was writing a research proposal, I went back and reread this 2015 study Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines, by Leslie, Cimpian, Meyer, and Freeland. The study investigates the phenomenon where different…

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Men and the “Philosophical Society”

Posted on Author KinoPosted in Life in Academia, Philosophy of Science, Scattered Plot
Kino
Kino
Kino specializes in the philosophy of statistics and its application in the social sciences. She looks at the methodology of social sciences in general but psychology in particular through the lens of data analysis. Kino posts under the banner "Scattered Plot".
Kino
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Men are more likely to make misogynistic arguments; so are philosophers. Could this be the explanation of gender disparity within philosophy? Today, Daily Nous published a guest post by Christina Easton titled Women and the “Philosophical Personality”, with the provocative hypothesis: Research suggests that there is a cognitive task on which philosophers tend to perform…

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Genetics of education (it’s not what you think! … no quite, at least)

Posted on Author KinoPosted in Philosophy of Science, Scattered Plot1 Reply
Kino
Kino
Kino specializes in the philosophy of statistics and its application in the social sciences. She looks at the methodology of social sciences in general but psychology in particular through the lens of data analysis. Kino posts under the banner "Scattered Plot".
Kino
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I have been taking a somewhat long break from blogging. A lot has happened recently. Some good: my partner and I just had a wedding, yay! Some not so good, which I won’t talk about today. Maybe I will at a later time. It turns out that, surprise surprise, stress does kill both creativity and…

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A case against talents

Posted on Author KinoPosted in Scattered Plot1 Reply
Kino
Kino
Kino specializes in the philosophy of statistics and its application in the social sciences. She looks at the methodology of social sciences in general but psychology in particular through the lens of data analysis. Kino posts under the banner "Scattered Plot".
Kino
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I went to a career workshop recently. The theme was that we should identify our strengths through some paid questionnaire service and structure our careers around them in some way (we didn’t get to the career part). In general, I’m not a big fan of this sort of career testing because I don’t think the…

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“the fundamental lexical hypothesis”, universal personality traits, and umami

Posted on Author KinoPosted in Philosophy of Science, Scattered Plot
Kino
Kino
Kino specializes in the philosophy of statistics and its application in the social sciences. She looks at the methodology of social sciences in general but psychology in particular through the lens of data analysis. Kino posts under the banner "Scattered Plot".
Kino
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The universal trait hypothesis Like many other psychology students, I was taught that “the various human traits and characters can be captured by five basic traits: conscientiousness, extroversion, emotional stability, openness-to-experience, agreeableness.” As someone who is not, by nature, very reflective, I never questioned what “can be captured” meant or how this caption was done.…

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Is intelligence a quantity?

Posted on Author KinoPosted in Philosophy of Science, Scattered Plot
Kino
Kino
Kino specializes in the philosophy of statistics and its application in the social sciences. She looks at the methodology of social sciences in general but psychology in particular through the lens of data analysis. Kino posts under the banner "Scattered Plot".
Kino
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This post is inspired by this book, which I’m currently in the process of reading: What is a quantity? Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, defines two kinds of quantity: multitude and magnitude. A multitude is a collection of discrete objects that can be counted. A magnitude is more interesting. The Aristotelian quote says “A quantity is a…

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Measurement as coordination

Posted on Author KinoPosted in Scattered Plot2 Replies
Kino
Kino
Kino specializes in the philosophy of statistics and its application in the social sciences. She looks at the methodology of social sciences in general but psychology in particular through the lens of data analysis. Kino posts under the banner "Scattered Plot".
Kino
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This post is going to be more like a reading report. It’s hard to have super exciting ideas every week; sooner or later I’ll have to write something mundane. However, as Jeff Berrett (a faculty at LPS and member of my dissertation committee) says: a good paper just needs to elicit one interesting thought in…

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Spearman’s g and what cross-culture tells us

Posted on Author KinoPosted in Philosophy of Science, Scattered Plot
Kino
Kino
Kino specializes in the philosophy of statistics and its application in the social sciences. She looks at the methodology of social sciences in general but psychology in particular through the lens of data analysis. Kino posts under the banner "Scattered Plot".
Kino
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Saw this today. There exist many similar studies. They seem to say a lot. They seem to say nothing. I’ll comment on some moving parts below. Spearman’s g Found in 31 Non-Western Nations: Strong Evidence That g Is a Universal Phenomenon Abstract Spearman’s g is the name for the shared variance across a set of…

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Writing a climate survey

Posted on Author KinoPosted in For reference, Life in Academia, Scattered Plot1 Reply
Kino
Kino
Kino specializes in the philosophy of statistics and its application in the social sciences. She looks at the methodology of social sciences in general but psychology in particular through the lens of data analysis. Kino posts under the banner "Scattered Plot".
Kino
Latest posts by Kino (see all)

I am currently in the process of putting together a climate survey to assess departmental climate. As a result, I’ve been looking at some existing surveys that other departments have done and, no offense, but most of them are terrible. It’s occurred to me that, of course, questionnaire construction is extremely difficult in all sorts…

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