Correcting Charles Murray’s Accomplishment Metric for Complicty

Posted by James Bowery on Tuesday, 27 December 2005 23:58.

Charles Murray uses citation analysis to account for “human accomplishment” in his book by that name. However he failed to take into account the fundamentally important accomplishment: negative numbers. He therefore assigns a positive value for citations which might be best viewed as a negation of human accomplishment. Examples of such negative accomplishments might be such works as “Das Kapital” (which set political economy back a century), “Civilization and its Disconents” (which set psychology back a century), “Anthropology and Modern Life” (which set sociology back a century) and “The Genetic Basis for Evolution Change” (which set human ecology back at least a generation). He could have avoided this fatal error of epistemology by using a truly important human accomplishment that’s over a century old: Factor analysis.

Charles Spearman invented factor analysis to test for the existence of an hypothesized general factor underlying all of what we think of as intelligent behavior. Spearman used a variety of tests for intelligence and then looked for correlations between them. He invented factor analysis so he could find common factors between these correlations. Spearman was strongly influenced by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Galton was one of the earliest proponents of eugenics, and invented the statistical definition of correlation to study the degree of heritability of various phenotypes, including intelligence. Eugenics is a highly controversial field so we should be unsurprised that the g factor, originating as it did with such a controversial area of research, has resulted in a long-standing dispute.

Something easily missed or ignored by the layman or amateur who is applying factor analysis to some area other than intelligence tests is that some of these correlations could be negative. For instance, if one is attempting to predict geographic rates of AIDS cases there is a strong positive correlation with the presence of blacks, hispanics and Jews in that geography but a strong negative correlation with the presence of self-identified “whites”.

Likewise in citation analysis it seems obvious that citation cabals which were accomplishing negative impacts on a field would present themselves as negatively correlated with the body of work that would ultimately prove to be correct. The correct way to proceed then with the sort of citation analysis claimed by Murray is to factor supposed “experts” to various schools of thought and figure out which of them were creating citation bias toward destructive channels by observing the degree to which they diverted attention from more productive lines of thought—lines of thought frequently preceeding the creation of destructive lines of thought. This diversion would present itself as the presence of a school of thought preceeding another, negatively correlated, school of thought, followed by the disappearance of the negatively correlated school of thought and reemergence of the original line of thought.

I have my opinions on why Murray failed to do this sort of negative accounting but the fact remains that he didn’t do it and it should be done.

Tags: Books

Comments:

Posted by John J Ray on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 00:55 | #

I think you credit Arabs unfairly. Like most of their alleged accomplishments, their numbers came from others —India in this case. Hooray for the South Asians!

Posted by Calvin on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 01:05 | #

Didn’t Hindu mathematics derive ultimately from the Chinese rod numerical system?

Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 01:11 | #

The last thing I want to see happen to this thread is diversion to a debate over Hindu vs Arabic priority over negative numbers. I’ve removed the credit to Arabs but not replaced it with a credit to Hindu accoutants.

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 03:43 | #

Schonberg and the Beatles would be my nomination for negative musical accomplishments. Keynes as well as Marx for negative economic accomplishment, Heisenberg in physics, Joyce and Hemingway in literature, Whistler and Picasso and Warhol in art, Sartre and Kant in philosophy.

This is a fun game!

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 03:56 | #

Oh, and don’t forget the Bloomsbury Group for negative all-round achievement! Peel, Gladstone and Disraeli in British politics, Lincoln, Hoover and both Roosevelts in American. Margaret Mead in anthropology, Mies van der Rohe in architecture (or maybe Gropius), Freud in psychology, Macauley in history (TOTALLY messed up the world’s understanding of the late 17th Century), Grant in war strategy (the WW I trenches were his fault). Descartes and Rev. Thomas Bayes in Mathematics (set theory and Bayesian probability are BOTH seriously misleading in most cases.)

Can’t think of a negative chemist, biologist or geologist right now, but I’m sure others can! Do we get points for each successful entry?

Posted by Metzger on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 04:35 | #

What is your opinion as to why Murray failed to do this?

Surely Murray didn’t intentionally do this in order to create the illusion that Marx, Boas, Freud, or Lewontin had significant positive achievements.

Posted by John S Bolton on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 06:22 | #

Murray doesn’t try to say that everything is positive in his list of thousands. It’s a record of significant influence on a field, not necessarily a significant positive influence. There has to be a preponderance of good contributions in the longterm lists, though. Otherwise, a majority of negative influences could be random and uncorrelated with each other, and would be. There are a million ways of doing damage to a complex machinery, but only a few ways of greatly improving its function.

Posted by Al Ross on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 06:48 | #

James Bowery’s four examples are interesting for another reason, viz, the authors of them are all Jewish. This tends to support Karl Popper’s view (and also that of Arthur Koestler) that members of their group are adept at the invention of pseudo-science.

Posted by seelow heights on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 07:24 | #

Can’t think of a negative chemist, biologist or geologist right now, but I’m sure others can! Do we get points for each successful entry?

OK, I’ll play. Lysenko =negative biologist.

Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 08:37 | #

John, “accomplishment” when qualified by “human” must mean something universal lest we take mere acquisition of money or power as “accomplishment”. In that sense, one is accomplished if one advances one’s purported field, however one is best described as complicit if one “accomplishes” its decline or impedance.

The signed quantity really does make more sense in the context of “human accomplishment”.