Either black women are ugly... or Satoshi Kanazawa needs to stop psychometring when stupid

Well. I was just going to publish a list of non-white authors to read, but a friend sent me a ridiculous story published by Psychology Today and so we have another story on race. Worse than yesterday, but this time science--not literature.

This evolutionary psychologist, Satoshi Kanazawa, published a short article on his PT blog claiming that it's an objective fact: human beings find black women less attractive than the rest of all other human beings (men of all races including black, and women of all other races.)

If you want a read a critique of it, a fellow PT scientist provides it, and all the feminist blogs have written on him (I haven't read them, but I'm sure they do a thorough job of tearing him a new one.) I think his idiocy can be summed up in one fact, not mentioned in his blog post: his dataset consisted of AMERICAN TEENAGERS. Impressions of attractiveness "I find this person good looking" by spotty faced American teens.

I do want to address two things, though.

#1 This is NOT a scientific study:

At the end Kanazawa decides, in a casual offhand manner, that the result can probably be explained by black women having more testosterone. That's not a study, it's an idiot with a computer, an hour of free time on his hands, and a high profile blog at his disposal.

A study means you come up with an hypothesis, good reasons for it drawing on other studies that been done, literature on the topic, ideas, original thought, qualitative information (like field studies, interviews etc.); THEN you run numbers; 9/10 times the numbers don't say anything useful and you are sad; if they do, then you discuss them in light of what you had theorized and say some intelligent things. That's good science.

Then, if it's a really important or useful field, someone else has to reproduce what you did, which is why you have to meticulously track and spell out every step (I sneezed at this step, and so forth), and make that information available to other scientists. For the reading pubic, you at least have to provide enough information for them to know the basics of what you did.

Sitting down at a computer with a data set and running some hypothetical situations ("I wonder if any one race is less attractive than another") is amusing, I've done it myself (ya not THAT question, but silly s**t), but it means NOTHING without a theory and qualitative work. It requires no skill other than knowing how the software works. What Kanazawa did probably took him an hour (he's worked with this data set in the past.)

(Where's SuperGran when we need her?)

#2 Kanazawa is going to smugly walk away from this controversy thinking this is about political correctness, and anti-evolutionary-biology, rather than his bad science:

Any normal scientist at this point in history believes both biology and environment are important, including evolutionary biologists/psychologists (of which K is the latter). Most people I meet tend towards Environment ("nurture") because we're still backlashing against the eugenics of the Nazis--the idea that we should kill off "imperfect" people before they're born. But not all evolutionary biology is about that. And if you believe homo/bisexuality is usually born, and not adopted, then you believe in biology too. Over-reliance on nurture has messed people up too.

So I agree with scientists who say we shouldn't be afraid of scientific discoveries even if they make us uncomfortable. For example, years ago two scientists proposed the possibility that rape was partially a genetic mutation in some males, based on bugs they'd studied. Their work was peer reviewed and duly critiqued as all work should be, and people aren't bugs; but I didn't agree with some people who criticized them on the basis that their argument was "dangerous" or blamed the victim. I read the original article, it was very sensitive. It didn't victim-blame at all, and if rape did turn out to be a genetic mutation, at least some of the time--and if that meant there was some more effective way to prevent it, like with medication--then I think we'd be stupid to ignore it. Just stupid. Less possibility of rape = good thing.

But ONE study won't prove this. The study has to be reproduced by others, and then it has to be tried on humans, and so forth. It has to be very rigorous. I believe ALL scientific studies have to be rigorous. And there's good reason to believe they often aren't. There are a lot of qualitative scientists who think quantitative studies (statistics-based) are crap; my stats prof used to argue that the problem isn't quantitative methods, it's poorly done quantitative methods.

LIKE SATOSHI KANAZAWA.

-->  If you teach Methods, save the damned article and use it on day one of your class. It's crap! Utter crap!! It's so crappy I'm using too many exclamation points and !!!ALL CAPS!!!

So when I see Kanazawa on his blog, whining that political correctness is the enemy of good science, that people hate evolutionary biological/psychological science because they're afraid of politically incorrect results, I want to tell him to -- excuse me for a moment -- to go f**k himself. I'm one of the most pro political correctness people you'll meet and I LURV evolutionary biology. Willing to defend rape scientists, for frick's sake.

But what people like me hate is BAD SCIENCE. KANAZAWA YOU EXEMPLIFY...

CRRRAPPY SCIENCE!

CRAP!

CRAP!

CRAP!

NOT BECAUSE IT'S UN-PC BUT BECAUSE IT'S

CRAP!

CRAP!

CRRRRRRAP!

NOT BECAUSE IT'S BIOLOGY-BASED

BUT BECAUSE IT'S ONLY BIOLOGY-BASED

BECAUSE IT'S

CRAP SCIENCE
CRAP!

CRAP!

CRAP!

And laaaaaaazy blog posting based on monkeying around on your computer while watching reruns of Big Bang Theory.

And Psychology Today are chickensh*ts for taking his article down, instead of leaving it up, along with an article apologizing for posting such inferior drivel. (After all, they left up his post saying the US should have nuked the Middle East after 9-11.)

And now, a picture of Minion when she was still a kitten. Cause I know that's what you need to get on with your day.

"I am so cute it keeells you. Keells you dead. Boom."

"Now buzz off, there's someone I needs to flame on the internets."