Don’t buy the Roissysphere’s B.S, unmarried women aged 25 to 45 are five times more likely to be virgins if they have a college degree than otherwise (yeah, yeah, correlation isn’t causation Mr. Muslim). I hope the National Survey on Family Growth is freely accessible online, but I’m too lazy to check it out till tomorrow.
UPDATE: You have to pay to get the CD-ROMs. Each year’s survey runs about 300 or so bucks.
November 10, 2009
Memo to conservative muslims in America: send your daughters to college
Posted by teageegeepea under Uncategorized[33] Comments
Entitled to an Opinion 
November 10, 2009 at 2:26 am
Controlling for IQ?
November 10, 2009 at 2:45 am
I haven’t read the study yet, but I assume not. Correlation, causation, blahblahblah.
November 10, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Maybe you think R. is a net destructive force — I’m actually pretty sure I disagree. But regardless of all that, can a dude who wants to understand things really afford not to read Roissy and Roosh?
Those guys have “ecological validity” miles beyond laboratory psych. They know a lot about human nature, in an objective and explicit way rather than an intuitional or novelistic way. They have insights that a book jock would find where else?
I exerted some of those behaviors myself in the past just naturally, with a hapless “style” completely my own that no one in the world would ever want to rip off, and that would make Roissy fall over laughing. But I really had no idea what it was all about, nor even any cognizance that there was any red thread. I’m sure 80% of people intuitively understood it more than me. Does any one know any academic corpus of evo psych on eros and dominance/value signaling that can match Roissy and Roosh? I suspect they are ahead of the whole academy.
It seems obvious that people such as scriptwriters knew these things in the past, near-consciously if not consciously, but I guess it was indecent to discuss it or at least to write it in straightforward nonfiction.
November 10, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Robin Hanson seems to agree on script-writers.
My impression from Roissy is that there’s a lot of style there to impress readers, but not much in the way of rigor to constrain bullshit. I’m of the view that bullshit is inevitable without constraint. I’ve got a similar complaint about Mencius Moldbug.
The question of whether it’s a “destructive force” was debated at Auster’s & Mangan’s a little bit back. I gave my two cents here.
November 11, 2009 at 10:24 am
I don’t get why you linked to George Sodini’s diary page — posted at Half Sigma — as an example of “the Roissysphere’s B.S.” nor what this has to do with the correlation betwen female virginity and college education. Sodini did seem to imagine that college girls are generally horney sluts, but I don’t think he was particularly interested in statistical verification of this presumption. I’d suspect it had a lot more to do with porno.
November 11, 2009 at 4:32 pm
The thing is, we are pretty comfortable with bullshit in non-evo bio. Evo, depending on who you ask, possibly suffers from overcomplex and overabstracted model & math “glass bead” malaise, much like econ. Non-evo suffers more from plain old bullshit, though there is also model malaise in animal models of diseases of unknown etiology. Obviously when the etiology is unknown, the depth of the analogy in also unknown. Unfortunately it is the etiology and the “deep” stuff just above it, that are interesting. However, occasionally it can be a huge success even when the etiologies differ, for example the monogenetic inbred dog model of narcolepsy that led to finding the key molecules in human narcolepsy, which is not monogenetic, and largely not genetic at all. (Its probably autoimmune, though that might not be the final etiology.)
Anyway, the bullshit, ie false papers, stems from traditionally using an alpha of 0.05, plus rather replete research funding. We should probably start using 0.015 now. I already do, sort of, and I doubt I’m the only one. If it aint down to 0.02 or less, I dont think much of it by itself; I will only update my thinking in a nontrivial way if there is other stuff pointing in the same direction. If its down to 0.01 I would say, wow this might actually be for real.
Throw in possibly multiple hypothesis tests per publication (some tests might not be mentioned in the paper). Plus multiple attempts at coming up with something for a paper, per realized paper. We are gonna need a Bonferonni correction for that, and where’s your 0.05 at now? Possibly as bad as 0.15. Then throw in minor bias in executing, and especially in designing, experiments. Viola, bullshit! Youve read p-ter’s assault on behavioral genetics and the fact that it might *all* be bullshit. (I think it was p-ter.) That’s actually not the only entire field or subfield that has been accused of 100% BSness, though I forget now what the other one was (it definitely wasnt fMRI — theres that too). Ioannidis, a major scourge of biomed, made a huge splash with “Why most published research findings are false,” in which he claimed to *prove* the title. I didnt read his bayesian math which is probably too hard for me. But there are sooo many interesting experiments that I know firsthand have been disconfirmed with published disconfirmation. Its as common as breathing.
So basically, if I’m gonna roll around on pubmed all night, I’ll be just as cautious and rejective as I would be in reading Roissy. Obviously physics and chem (and probably biochem) arent like this. But who understands physics? I doubt I ever will.
November 11, 2009 at 4:42 pm
> sooo many interesting experiments that I know firsthand have been disconfirmed with published disconfirmation
There may be more that arent published. If I’m interested in doing a follow-on paper to what you discovered, I’ll first try to replicate the most basic finding in your paper, since I need to get that running before I can do my thing. If I cant reproduce that, then doing further assays to really prove in a publishable way that your paper is wrong, is usually a bad use of my time. Much worse than doing something new of my own. Even if I am tenured by my U, I am still never tenured by NIH; I always have to make myself look worthy of my next grant.
Nevertheless, the system still works fairly well overall, and it would be hard to improve it much, though a lower alpha would probably be a good idea.
November 11, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Dr. Horsemeat:
I’m surprised you’re surprised, since in the first entry he discusses a protective father’s perspective on sending his daughter to college. I couldn’t have come up with a more fitting example if I tried (unless maybe I was Whiskey). You’re right that he doesn’t mention statistics, that’s precisely my complaint about constaint-free bullshitters. I don’t think he was describing pornos, his “white dudes” comment is (besides being manifestly false) best seen as referring to his own lack of success. Perhaps his view of reality was warped by porn in addition to the PUA community, but its still the way he viewed reality (though he is using hyperbole, he thought it was a truth he was exaggerating).
Eric Johnson:
I find it plausible that most published results are wrong (because there are so many more incorrect theories than correct ones). You’re arguing for a higher standard than 0.05, but that doesn’t serve as support for arguments with neither data nor confidence levels. I think all people are afflicted with cognitive biases, but that doesn’t mean all attempts get around it are useless. Rather, it means lower standards should be even less persuasive.
Could you explain the “malaise” bit?
I’d heard Greg Cochran reference narcolepsy as the result of infection rather than genetics, but I hadn’t heard of the dog. I don’t recall p-ter’s critique of behavioral genetics either. I recall hearing of critiques of some studies using fMRI (I had a post on the dead salmon one), but they were presented as a small part of fMRI literature.
November 12, 2009 at 9:23 am
I guess I’m just not familiar enough with “the Roissysphere” mindset. I check his blog from time to time, but each post seems to have about 285 comments, most of which are notable mainly for the fact that the people who left them can actually type. “I got myself some poon-tang, and didn’t even have to pay for it!!!” wears thin once the comments hit triple digits.
Roissy himself can be amusing from time to time, and I do find the G Manifesto an engaging fabulist of sorts.
November 12, 2009 at 6:53 am
[…] Wanna Get Laid? Avoid Women With College Degrees! from Entitled to An Opinion […]
November 12, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Doc, no one can read all those comments, but if you want to be a horrid elitist monster…
tier 1. Vladimir and Thursday, definitely
2. PA and alias clio. Maybe Doug1 as well — this is more subjective than Vlad and Thurs.
However, “random” people do say brilliant things, not rarely.
Just when I’m defending him, Roissy goes all stupid with a green light to cousin incest.
November 12, 2009 at 5:51 pm
I like the incest post. Shores up his amoralist bona fides.
November 12, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Well, the incongruity of your title, is the problem. Why Muslims especially?
Roissy and Mencius are like Thomas Carlyle in that they are sensationalistic, but are dependent on intellectuals whose data is rarely perfect, despite their rigor and devotion to science. Take Carlyle’s use of John Stuart Mill’s research for his works on the French Revolution, a great deal of which, was erroneous and exposed by Nesta Webster, thirty years after.
November 12, 2009 at 6:42 pm
TGGP,
Is there no place for bullshit? Or does it irk you that Roissyphiles exhibit undue confidence about issues that are better left to other domains?
Personally, I take Roissy as an entertaining charlatan and polemicist. His stuff reminds me of 70s vintage cocktail chatter in the key of Eric Berne, with notes of Desmond Morris and Anton LaVey. It’s pop-psych with a new-fangled insurrectionist subtext, played to a market. His best essays remind me of Schopenhauer (perhaps my all-time favorite bullshitter).
The online PUA scene is a peculiar, inevitable and oddly amusing manifestation of nerd culture. It seems more like a cyclical fad than anything to be taken too seriously. Roissy should write a book while he’s still the life of the party.
Anyone else looking forward to “The Original of Laura”?
November 12, 2009 at 10:09 pm
I haven’t read that much of Roissy himself either, its more the overlapping portions of the Roissysphere and HBD blogs or Steveosphere I frequently come across and get irritated by. A commenter at Steve’s did recently link to Roissy telling off Whiskey for his completely backwards take on the Weathermen, so he gets kudos for calling out a fan’s BS.
I’ve read some of Thursday and he doesn’t seem too bad. Not sure who the other people mentioned are.
I recall Steve Pinker and Jonathan Haidt both using an incest story involving siblings using birth control, and they’re still part of polite company. Cousin incest isn’t actually that problematic genetically as long as it isn’t compounded by repeated incidents over generations, as is the case with some clannish Muslim communities.
I mentioned Muslims because they are well known for the lack of female education in their country, and use of honor-killings and surgical repair of hymens on daughters who lose their virginity outside of marriage.
I knew Carlyle was friends with Mill when writing his history, but I didn’t know Mill had contributed that much.
Bullshit can be an entertaining recreational activity, but if you engage in it don’t then try to pull the Jon Stewart two-step of flipping back and forth from posing as a real truth-teller. That’s something that’s irritated me about IOZ recently. Or to complain about Mencius again, droning on and on about how the success of reactionaries is dependent on them being 100% right all the time with no room for error, and then going “Well when I said Lee Kuan Yew and Deng were both Communists I didn’t really mean Lee was a Communist”.
I think Tucker Max already wrote the asshole book. From what I’ve heard the movie based on it sucks because he was too much of an asshole to leave it to the professionals.
November 13, 2009 at 9:23 am
Actually, your debunking of the “bare branches” nostrum may have the most relevance here. Wack-a-mole.
November 19, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Tucker Max? I didn’t realize how much of a nerd you were TGGP.
November 20, 2009 at 12:17 am
I actually haven’t read much Tucker Max. My sister pointed out his site to me, but I’m not a law student and don’t care about that milieu. Does that make me more or less nerdy?
November 20, 2009 at 2:07 am
I figure knowing about the movie made you a nerd (give that almost no one outside his forums did) and knowing the reasons for its failure made you even more nerdy.
I lurked the forums so I guess I’m a nerd squared.
November 21, 2009 at 7:09 pm
I didn’t know about any forums. I heard about it via Fark.
November 13, 2009 at 2:29 am
This be the two part p-ter rip-up I was referring to. If you read it youll see that my recollection was fairly correct but not 100%. “The letter killeth, the…”
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/another-candidate-gene-association.php
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/why-are-most-genetic-associations-found.php
By “model malaise” I mean what William Hamilton expresses below, and John Emerson’s pessimism about Xtreme-math economics at GNXP. The kind of excessive modeling, complete with a level of complexity meant partly to intimidate other scholars, that crops up when neither experiments not logic can shed that much light on whether the model even has any value. Skip to “You use a lot of mathematics.” A hilarious teaser:
“A nice anecdote about people’s fear of mathematics occurs to me. There was an IRA bomb discovered in this town, which had never actually been fired, and yet had not been found either for about a year. Can you guess where it was planted? The person put it behind the calculus books in one of the major bookshops of Oxford! I guess he choose calculus-books because he reckoned that those would be the ones least often be pulled off the shelves.”
http://www.froes.dds.nl/HAMILTON.htm
Unlike Moldy I wouldnt necessarily put climate science in this category where the strength of the model’s predictions cannot really be evaluated even by logic, much less by experiment. I mean, there are a lot of molecules to model. But its not really that complicated to consider that the earth simply having a balanced energy budget where it absorbs X amount of radiant energy and radiates away the same amount. Tough there is more complexity to it than that, and more than I know.
November 13, 2009 at 10:30 am
Roissy was getting a little too bourgeois, of late, what with the Spearhead and other sundry followers who seek the great guru, so this post was a welcome return to traditional Roissy style.
But Whiskey, Bardamu, Chuck Ross and most the Spearhead ensemble are completely tiresome.
This ‘game thing’ has become, as Chip observed, a nerd phenomenon.
I read Roissy from day one, because he was entertaining and his sociological perspectives and experiences(of the non-sexual variety, that is) parallelled many of my own observations on this wicked world.
November 15, 2009 at 4:44 pm
p-ter seems to be saying that candidate gene studies are generally wrong (because there are so many candidates and so few participants in these studies). I recently came across a dispute about Behavioral Genetics (via Liberal Biolrealist), where the term is used to refer to other things.
Chip, credit where it’s due: Jason Malloy debunked it, I just promoted his debunking (more accurately, it had already been debunked in the academic literature and Malloy cited the debunking to the Steveosphere).
I don’t know if I’ve read the Spearhead directly, but that is basically what I’m talking about with the “Roissysphere”.
November 15, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Thursday is very pronomian. He says he only played around with PUAism so he could get a better deal on marrying a church girl eventually.
If I’m not mistaken, Vladimir is found on 2blowhards, U-Res, and R Hanson’s as well as Roissy’s and Thursday’s.
November 16, 2009 at 3:22 am
ach, being Muslim and wanting to send my daughter to college-when I have her that is-I opened the first link out of curiosity, had a WHISKEY TANGO FOXTR..reaction, then started wondering why waste time answering idiots like that?
November 16, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Now Vladimir sounds more familiar.
when I have her that is
Always good to think ahead.
why waste time answering idiots like that?
Some of us have more time than sense.
November 17, 2009 at 2:18 am
Chip I have to doubt unless you correct me that any of those older scholars/etc picked up on all the major points that Roissy/etc have. The best example would be the “shit test” theory that a woman will probe a man’s general dominance level by direct experiment. That is, by attacking him for something, perhaps intentionally unfairly (unconsciously intentionally), to see if he will fold and how fast and how much. Or just half-insulting him to see if he will respond nonchalantly. All indicating whether he is confidant, and whether he has the acumen to handle mild or serious conflict among men.
November 17, 2009 at 2:20 am
Did that theory come from anywhere in respectable evo psych? I havent heard of it there but I dont read that much of the stuff. Those players might have discovered it themselves.
November 18, 2009 at 8:46 am
Eric,
I don’t deny that Roissyfolk offer original insights, but perhaps more than anything else in their bag of tricks, it’s the “shit test” that makes me think of Berne’s TA. Admittedly, it’s been years since I thumbed through “The Games People Play,” but you should be able to find a cheap copy at any used bookstore. Berne’s emphasis is very different, but his read on interpersonal dynamics, especially between the sexes, seems very similar to what’s being articulated in the argot of “Game.”
November 18, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Have you read Erving Goffman? I haven’t, but H.A promotes him a lot as the theorist of interpersonal interaction. Randall Collins’ work seems heavily based on Goffman’s.
November 18, 2009 at 10:18 pm
I read some Goffman back when — “Presentation of Self” and “Stigma.” He writes like a novelist, or an early practitioner of New Journalism.
November 21, 2009 at 2:19 am
Chip,
I like your engagement with repugnant ideas. I’m curious what you know and what you speculate about what happened with repugnant biomedical research from Dr. Ishii’s labs until the present. Specifically that timeline, because his marriage of technocratic competence and lack of micromoral constraints on human experimentation seem unique and pretty much became high level classified after WW2.
Also general speculation and thought about the global intelligence communities and classified, repugnant research would be interesting.
November 22, 2009 at 11:17 am
HA,
It’s an interesting subject, though I’m sure I know far less than you. One problem is that the secrecy under which such research was undertaken invites a terrible mystique. I am frankly skeptical, for example, of accounts of human vivisection at Unit 731.
I think it is well established that unconscionable experiments involving human subjects were conducted by all sides during the intra-war period. From what is known, such research was largely and pragmatically concerned with the effects of various chemical agents. If Dr. Ishii’s data were declassified in total, my hunch is that it would add little to our understanding of anything now worth knowing. Cast a wider net, and my confidence decreases.
If you would like to refer me to relevant literature on the general subject of “repugnant research,” I will make it a point to follow up at the Hog.