Tag Archives: Gelman

When intelligence hurts

This is a real title of a scientific paper “When intelligence hurts and ignorance is bliss

Higher intelligence may have a downside in the modern world, by allowing life satisfaction to be more vulnerable from being better able to comprehend the severity of problems that did not exist in the ancestral world.

which isn’t an unexpected conclusion – although Gelman notes some circular argument as in earlier Kanazawa papers

In the past few years, Satoshi Kanazawa, a reader in management and research methodology at the London School of Economics, published a series of papers in the Journal of Theoretical Biology with titles such as “Big and Tall Parents Have More Sons” (2005), “Violent Men Have More Sons” (2006), “Engineers Have More Sons, Nurses Have More Daughters” (2005), and “Beautiful Parents Have More Daugh-ters” (2007). More recently, he has publicized some of these claims in an article, “10 Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature,” for Psychology Today and in a book written with Alan S. Miller, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters.However, the statistical analysis underlying Kanazawa’s claims has been shown to have basic flaws, with some of his analyses making the error of controlling for an intermediate outcome in estimating a causal effect, and another analysis being subject to multiple-comparisons problems.

While I wholeheartedly agree with Gelman, his objection nevertheless confirms the hypothesis…