Statistics LOL: the button & xConorx insomnia thread

Nah, this is another area where Gould was chatting complete shite

The jury's still out on Burt. Some people think that he just got confused and muddled when he was old, while others think he carried out deliberate fraud in his results. In any case, most of his results have been replicated by others.

William Hamilton, for one, has defended him:

"In one case where the attempt was made by various writers of nurturist and leftist persuasion to convince the public - claiming even proof - that one psychometrist, Sir Cyril Burt, had published fraudulent data, it later came to light that the tirade that had been either wrong or grossly exaggerated in a very high proportion of the claims it had raised (Joynson, 1989; Fletcher, 1991; Mackintosh, 1995). Muddle a-plenty of a minor nature was indeed evident in Burt's late-life publications on IQ and heritability but no case of fraud has been proven. Stimulated by the earlier tirades to look up some of Burt's books and papers, a field I have hardly ever touched, it seemed strange to me that a man collecting and writing so much about remediations for handicapped people, working and running clinics in London's poorest districts, should ever have been seen as an elitist bigot. What I read suggested the attacks on his early work must have been primed by a mere handful of paragraphs, seldom even making up whole pages (and these within large books that otherwise hardly addressed the topic of genetic quality), in which he dared to state that he regarded some of the conditions he described as hereditary, thus inevitable and likely to re-create their problems if their bearers had children. In spite of so much clear refutation of evidence, the writers of the original attacks (which began with what I can only call a cowardly immediacy once Burt had died and it had become known that all his notes and records had been burnt (this on the advice of one of his detractors) have never changed their accusations and continue to republish them (Rose, Lewontin & Kamin, 1989; Gould, 1996). Papers at least half-heartedly supporting of the tirades still emerge but the focus appears to have shifted more towards showing muddle and repetition by an old man as opposed to claims of purposeful inaccuracy (Butler & Petrulis, 1999). The idea that Burt led his field away from the truths now generally accepted, or even proposed unsustainably high values of heritability, seems now to be practically abandoned (Mackintosh, 1995)"

I think so, but wasn't he going on Kamin's evidence, which is controversial? The stuff that looks falsified is his work after WWII, when he was old, and suffering from Meniere's disease which has a lot of psychological effects like forgetfulness, confusion etc. There's been a few books that purport to clear his name, but as I said, the jury's still out.

I'm sure Burt was wrong in a fair amount of things he said, and his later work does look dodgy, but it's a leap from that to saying he was a racist elitist bigot, which is what the consensus has usually been. He did some decent things - demonstrating that the intelligence of girls and boys is the same, good work with handicapped and the poor etc. He also said he was frustrated by the fact that a lot of the black children he worked with were obviously a lot more intelligent than the tests picked up on. Like he would test them once, then he would spend some time talking and playing with them, and when he tested them a second time, their IQs would have jumped up by an average of 10 points.

Yeah that review's from '85 - there were a bunch of books trying attempting to clear his name in the early 90s. In my opinion, I think that probably some of his numerical data in his work after WWII was false, but this could be put down to him being an old man with a psychological illness just as easily as anything else.

Yeah I think so, and that's definitely dodgy. But also there were claims that he had completely made up two of his collaborators and cooked their data, but these two 'missing' assistants were later found and so he's been cleared of that charge at least.

of course the fact Burt got away with such flimsy work for so long means nothing, they were just doing 'bad science'.