Orton's Arm

I suggest you read your own quotes again. Listen Einstein: you obtain a group average by averaging out individuals. Heritability is a group average, just like your quote said. As with any other group average, you calculate it by averaging out individuals. The fact you can't grasp something even as simple as this is truly pathetic. If you have a die with sides cat, dog, mouse, bear, etc., and if you average out all the sides, the average comes to this: "Ramius is an idiot."

Least: OJ Simpson, a real embarrassment to the franchise and the city of Buffalo. Most: Frank Reich, a man every Bills fan can be proud to root for.

No, I don't want Moulds back. Houston didn't want him as their #2 WR. Why would a Houston reject be good enough for Buffalo? We should be building this team with younger players, not guys on the tail ends of their careers. By the time Moulds learns the offense and develops chemistry with Losman, he'll be retired. Moulds would take the roster spot of a younger guy we already have. Who do you get rid of? You can't get rid of Parrish, because he's actually useful as a WR. And the Bills should hold onto Price, because of his production and the way he's taken Parrish under his wing. So the Bills might need to get rid of a guy like Sam Aiken, and that would hurt our special teams.

Is there any particular reason why you think the Allstate stats "proved" that immigrants are average or good drivers? I'm not sure how those stats could go about "proving" such a point actually. But I'd like to know which particular thought process led you to that rather interesting conclusion.

Instead of "winning" a name-calling contest with you, I'd prefer to avoid that kind of game in the first place. How's this: I won't call you names if you don't call me names. Sound fair?

And Tom's from DC, and he'd no doubt thinks he's a good driver too. I'm not trying to make any assumptions about you personally, and I'm sorry if anything I said came across that way. But I do feel that opening up the borders--as we did in 1965--has done this country a lot more harm than good. I'd like to see laws and policies changed, because I want this country to retain the identity it had when I was a child. My quarrel is with the corrupt politicians who keep the border open so that corporations can continue to use immigration to lower wage rates. My quarrel is not with you.

The saying you're thinking of involves a blind squirrel. Hey, if you're going to insult my intelligence, at least try avoiding obvious errors. Then again, if you were into avoiding obvious errors, you wouldn't be insulting my intelligence in the first place, now would you?

The reason correlation doesn't prove causation is that there are generally several possible explanations for why any given correlation exists. Sometimes X might cause both Y and Z, so you'd see a correlation between Y and Z. Or the correlation between Y and Z might be a coincidence. Or Y might be causing Z, or Z might be causing Y. Statistics generally can't tell us which of these competing explanations is correct. So why do you think that cities with high levels of immigrants generally have poor auto safety records? Coincidence? Some underlying factor which both attracts immigrants while also causing bad driving? Or do you think that recent immigrants might, on average, be worse drivers than people who were born here?

Darin has done nothing here for which he need apologize. Nor has he done anything to, as you put it, "once again [make himself] look like a complete idiot."

The correlation is consistent with what I've been saying, without either proving it or disproving it.

Do you hear me bringing up that dice example to try to explain regression toward the mean? No. I've tried to pound that concept through your three foot skull through various methods, most especially the Duke/Stanford/et al articles. And you know what? I do think that, at some level, after a countless number of pages, you now understand the test/retest effect. Whether you consistently admit to understanding it is another story entirely. What you don't understand--what you're shockingly ignorant of--is my own position on the topics. I've pointed out that the test/retest effect can and does create the appearance that bright parents tend to have children that aren't quite as above-average as their parents. But from the very beginning, I've understood that the test/retest effect is a separate phenomenon from actual movement toward the population's mean. And we could have had that misunderstanding cleared up 60 pages back had your communication style relied less on the insupportable accusation, and more on, um, actual communication. You know, that thing that 99% of people do when they're trying to get a complex concept cleared up.

Molson has done nothing here for which he need apologize. Nor has he done anything to, as you put it, "once again [make himself] look like a complete idiot." What I found interesting about that link is that the safest drivers tend to be in Midwestern states such as Kansas or Iowa. Meanwhile, immigrant-heavy cities (such as Miami, other Florida cities, Texas cities, etc.) are correlated with worse driving records. Now, I know that Ramius is eager to jump up and tell us that correlation does not prove causation--as though this hadn't occurred to anyone other than him. He'd have a point--sort of. The apparent correlation between having lots of immigrants and worse driving doesn't prove my point. On the other hand, that correlation is completely consistent with my point.

Fair enough.

Normally, I have very little respect for Al Gore. But the fact that you so evidently think so little of his movie makes me believe there must be some truth to it. The issue of global warming itself is intrinsically complicated. We can be fairly confident human industrial activity is responsible for the increasing level of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. To what extent is that extra CO2 warming up the planet? That's difficult to say. But then there are all the extra political factors involved. You have the radical Leftists, who want to make Western nations look bad. But as places like China and India continue to industrialize, the case that global warming=West bad will be increasingly difficult to make. Radical leftists also see environmentalism as an excuse to dilute private property rights, and to increase the size, power, and inefficiency of the federal government. But there are others--honest people--who see environmentalism as a mechanism to promote the well-being of the environment. The litmus test to separate the Marxists from those who actually care about the environment is this: what's their stance on immigration? Immigration is harmful to the environment, which is why real environmentalists oppose it. But Marxists welcome immigration as a means to destroy the existing social order, as well as the white race. Marxists feel the destruction of all races and all existing non-communist social orders is a necessary precursor to the coming revolution. By systematically excluding Marxists from the debate about environmentalism (or any other topic, for that matter), we can arrive at moderate, decent solutions to our problems. Specifically, the U.S. needs an environmental policy which combines our need for a free market economy with our duty to be good stewards of the environment.

Yeah, I didn't notice my name in the thread's title, nor in the first post. How on earth does this thread have anything to do with me?

Good grief! The analogy I initially used may have been a little obscure, but it shouldn't have been as confusing to you (or to Ramius) as all that. For the purposes of our discussion, someone's "true" I.Q. was defined as the average score they'd get if they took the test 1000 times (assuming no learning effect or fatigue effect). You give someone an I.Q. test one time, to estimate their average score over 1000 tests. If you want to bring dice into the discussion--which you did--that'd be like rolling a die one time, in order to estimate the die's average value if rolled 1000 times. It's really not that difficult an analogy; though I'm not exactly surprised that you and your wife Ramius lack the ability to understand it.

I've lived in a number of different states. And guess what? The quality of driving varies from place to place. And no, it's not just a function of population density either. The fact that you disagree is a function of your own density. What's most amusing about your post is that you bought Bungee Jumping DC Tom's line about there being some sort of "math" that I ought to be doing to disprove the Stanford/Duke/University of Chicago articles. Hey, I'm sure Tom's got a bridge he'd like to sell you--why don't you buy that too?

I detected the sarcasm all right. You're not as subtle as you think. Nor as smart.

Please tell me you're not as intellectually shallow as this post implies.

Wrong. Ramius can't define the word "heritability" to save his own life. He thinks that a group average can be calculated without reference to the individuals of the group! He's too stupid to understand the quote he provided, he's too stupid to understand what an average is anyway, he's too stupid to know what an expected value is, he's too stupid to understand the first word of my (or anyone else's) posts, he's too stupid to understand the test/retest effect, he's too stupid to avoid quoting Marxists like Stephen Jay Gould, he's too stupid to know when he's out of his depth. He is, in short, too stupid for words.

Are you intentionally being an obtuse, arrogant, ignorant idiot, or does that just come naturally?

I don't think you're wrong. I know you're wrong. Your inability to define the word "heritability," your inability to understand that a group average is calculated by averaging out the individuals of the group, your complete lack of knowledge of any form of psychometrics--these things all add up to you claiming to know everything, while actually knowing nothing.

You're also a comedic genius. Except without the comedy. And except without the genius.

First, I'm not saying that all the bad Florida drivers I've seen have been recent immigrants. But the quality of Florida driving is atrocious, at least in the areas in which I've lived. And the people doing the bad driving--at least the ones I've seen--haven't been the elderly retirees that one normally associates with bad Florida driving. No, the people I've seen messing up have generally been young or middle-aged, predominately Latino, with some whites and Asians in the mix. The bad drivers have been both men and women. Until you've lived in Florida, you can't possibly know exactly how bad Florida driving can be. Articles like the one we saw earlier in this thread come as no surprise to me; nor should they surprise anyone familiar with how the open border policy is changing this country.

You still don't understand a single word of what we've been discussing, do you?