Fear not, I am not going to perform any analysis proving the intellectual superiority of any race or gender. Also, as a 100% Spaniard (I need to check on that though) I do not belong to the “elite” of ethnics groups disputing supremacy, namely: Northern Europeans, Jews and Far-East Asians and, quite frankly, I feel kinda good about it since I’d rather stick to the Latin Lover stereotype which, by all means, it is true.
Recently I came across a video titled Steven Pinker – Jews, Genes and Intelligence. Typically I would have disregarded this video as your standard white supremacy internet rhetoric however, I know Steven Pinker from his published works and achievements, and he is no small fish in the Psychology and Cognitive Science world. That is why I decided to give a shot to his video to see what’s what until he began talking about statistics. These are his words:
“…Jewish achievements might have an explanation on another fact that has long been known; that Jewish score on average higher on IQ tests than any ethnic group for what there’s comparable data. Their mean IQ is between 108 and 115, the mean of the European population is by definition a hundred which means that the Jewish average is a whole standard deviation higher than the [European] average… Importantly, even if the effect is moderate on average it’s a mathematical fact in Normal Distributions, that is Bell’s Curves, that small effects in the average can translate into huge effects at the extreme… So with one standard deviation difference between groups a score that is three standard deviation above the mean in the higher distribution is four standard deviations in the lower distribution which means there are 42 times as many people at that cut off.” – Steven Pinker
In short, according to Steven Pinker there are 42 times more chances for a Jewish baby to be born an IQ genius than for an European one… But, is that really so?
One would think that humanity would not have a need for good random number generators until computers and simulations were invented since, for most practical purposes, tossing a coin or throwing a die should suffice us all. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw in this four to five thousand years old Chinese divination book called I Ching a RNG algorithm that reminds modern Linear Congruential Generators! But why the need for such a complex procedure to render random numbers?
Artemisia Stems
The I Ching divination process requires to randomly select two trigrams via a rather convoluted process using either stems of Artemisia or Yarrow. And although I acquired this ancestral book a long, long, time ago, truth is that when reading it as an oracle I always used the simplified version for lazy busy people consisting in simply tossing three coins and checking the combination of heads and tails.
I always thought that the traditional form was just a magical way to do the same thing that we can do by tossing three coins, but today, for no particular reason that having too much free time in my hands, I gave a deeper mathematical look to this traditional form and it turns out that it renders a complete different random result that tossing three coins!
Well, a mathematical curiosity you might think, but does it matter? It might! Millions of people seek advice using the simplified coin version to render the I Ching Yin Yang oracles. In this post I will show how the three coins method yields an equal proportion on Old Yin and Old Yang oracles signs whereas the traditional method yields three times more Old Yang signs than Old Yin!
This means that The I Ching, in its traditional form to draw oracles, promotes Yang behaviour over Yin, that is, it promotes among its users action, imagination, creativity, strength whereas, nowadays, with the simplified three coin version, the active and passive answers are even out.
I am not a sinologist nor a psychologist so I cannot really tell what version would have a better influence among practitioners lives, but I know though that the traditional form promotes Yang among those seeking advice which, at first glance, seems like a positive thing to do and, since this book is used by millions of people, maybe experts in the field should advice to practitioners not to use three coins anymore when using the I Ching. For those interested in having a traditionally sound oracle in terms of probability, I will show a few simple ways to achieve just that at the end of this post.
This book has impressed mathematicians like Leibniz, psychologists like Jung, poets like Jorge Luis Borges and all kind of intellectuals all over the world for centuries. And regardless you believe or not whether it has magical properties, what is certain is that it has deep psychological sapiential ones. This is not only the oldest book in human history, but a beautiful one. So, before we plunge into the mathematical details of the traditional algorithm to draw oracles, let’s share this poem from Borges about the I Ching to break the ice.
For a Version of I Ching
Para una versión del I King
The future is as immutable As rigid yesterday. There is nothing That is no more than a single, silent letter In the eternal and inscrutable Writing whose book is time. He who walks away From home has already come back. Our life Is a future and well-traveled track. Nothing dismisses us. Nothing leaves us. Do not give up. The prison is dark, Its fabric is made of incessant iron, But in some corner of your cell You might discover a mistake, a cleft. The path is fatal as an arrow But God is in the rifts, waiting.
El porvenir es tan irrevocable Como el rígido ayer. No hay una cosa Que no sea una letra silenciosa De la eterna escritura indescrifrable Cuyo libro es el tiempo. Quien se aleja De su casa ya ha vuelto. Nuestra vida Es la senda futura y recorrida. Nada nos dice adiós. Nada nos deja. No te rindas. La ergástula es oscura, La firme trama es de incesante hierro, Pero en algún recodo de tu encierro Puede haber un descuido, una hendidura, El camino es fatal como la flecha Pero en las grietas está Dios, que acecha.
Human minds are the mother of all interesting things since anything that we might consider interesting is so because our minds make us believe so. Seems then reasonable that all kind of philosophical issues and scientific problems cannot be properly addressed unless we correctly understand how our minds work, but what we know about how they work?
I’m a sinner, I’m a saint…
Cognitive Science offers many theories on how any mind might work, but when it comes to our minds there seem to be evidences put forward by psychologists that, whatever the way they work, human minds do not abide to the laws of probabilities.
Several attempts have been made to explain these results, and one of the latest comes from the hand of Quantum Mechanics… No kidding.
So when I saw this valiant attempt from theoretical physicists to explain how the human mind works by using their all mighty and powerful Quantum Hammer, I thought it was a good moment to explain an alternative solution that I myself worked out long, long ago, after being exposed to this problem by philosopher Paul Thagard in his excellent book MIND.
Also, Sister Hot is my assistant and I need her to prove my point which is that our minds might abide to probability laws more than we think after all. If you want to know how she is going to assist me you need to keep reading; probability can be sexy 😉 Continue reading →
At most 22 percent of catholic priests in the USA are homosexuals.
Homosexual men in the USA, as a group, molest children at a rate at least 15 times higher than heterosexual men.
One asteroid rubs Earth, a meteorite crashes on Russia and, a few days later, Pope Benedict XVI took the cosmic message and resigned. Nonetheless many people question the true reason for his resignation alleging that it has nothing to do with fatigue but rather with homosexuality networks within the Church (CNN guest claiming a 50% of homosexuals among priests) and unresolved pedophilia scandals. So I took a look at this percentage with our best friend when it comes to politically incorrect statistics; Bayes’ Theorem, and I got the results displayed above.
I know, I know, the numbers are pretty crazy, but they are based on data fetched from official sources and, before going into the details, let me play sociologist. Although homosexuals, as a group, molest children at higher rates than heterosexuals it is very important to realize that this does not necessarily mean homosexuals are more prone towards this behavior, assuming this might constitute an ecological fallacy, in this case it makes more sense that this outcome obeys to the fact that young boys are way less protected by parents than young girls and predators take advantage of this.
The Calculations
To estimate the rate of homosexuals among catholic priests we will first estimate how much more likely are male homosexuals to engage in pederasty compared to male heterosexuals, then we will use this result join with the by gender percentage of children abused by catholic priests (81 percent of the victims were males in the USA) to calculate the final figure.
French psychologist Michel Gauquelin gained notoriety in the 50’s after publishing data showing that sportsmen were born in a non random fashion when considering the movement of planet Mars, the nicknamed Mars Effect has been the core of passionate discussions over its statistical validity since then but, beyond whether this effect truly holds or not, there are many reasons why genuine statistically significant data can be found in the astrology world, so we’d do better not to ignore planets and stars entirely.
Number of sportsmen born given the position of planet Mars according to Gauquelin’s data
We humans develop efficient strategies in our daily life that are useful for most situations, for example, if we see dark clouds and a few moments later it rains we associate dark clouds with rain and, voilà, next time we see dark clouds we take measures. The problem begins when we break a leg right after seeing a black cat, our association machine, a.k.a brain, does its magic and next time we see a black cat we take measures too. But you know what? The brain is right!
What is not so right is human difficulties to removed associations once they are set in our brains, a.k.a stubbornness. We humans develop all sort of strategies too keep our associations alive and demand extraordinary amounts of evidences to break them yet, even when those evidences are presented, we keep fighting them by doubting the methodology or the honesty of the persons bringing them up. There might be evolutionary advantages explaining why we create associations so easily but cannot break them with the same ease, but whatever the reasons are the problem only worsens when in some cases our stubbornness makes the associations come true! And that is what astrology is all about. These are a few examples of how astrology makes spurious associations come true: Continue reading →
Fear not, I am not going to perform any analysis proving the intellectual superiority of any race or gender. Also, as a 100% Spaniard (I need to check on that though) I do not belong to the “elite” of ethnics groups disputing supremacy, namely: Northern Europeans, Jews and Far-East Asians and, quite frankly, I feel kinda good about it since I’d rather stick to the Latin Lover stereotype which, by all means, it is true.
Alea Deum 