NY Times publishes Gladwell's letter and Pinker's response
Bret L
>> "In the New York Times here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/books/review/Letters-t-LETSGOTOTHET_LETTERS.html?_r=1
You've already seen Malcolm Gladwell's letter, with his ad hominem
attack on me as a crimethinker. I'd half-assumed that the NYT would
cut that part out in the interests of saving space, but they left it
in.
From the NYT:
Steven Pinker replies:
What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what
psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the
journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related,
probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many
important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.”
Similar conclusions were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by
the American Psychological Association, and in recent studies (some
focusing on outliers) by Dean Simonton, David Lubinski and others.
Gladwell is right, of course, to privilege peer-reviewed articles
over blogs. But sports is a topic in which any academic must answer to
an army of statistics-savvy amateurs, and in this instance, I judged,
the bloggers were correct. They noted, among other things, that Berri
and Simmons weakened their “weak correlation” (Gladwell described it
in the New Yorker essay reprinted in “What the Dog Saw” as “no
connection”) by omitting the lower-drafted quarterbacks who,
unsurprisingly, turned out not to merit many plays. In any case, the
relevance to teacher selection (the focus of the essay) remains
tenuous.
As a commenter pointed out, this debate over NFL quarterbacks is
really a stalking horse for the debate over IQ and race, which, in
turn, influences practically every other concept about how the world
works.
For example, if NFL experts can't predict better than random which
college quarterback will outperform which in the NFL, then why should
we believe that, say, the SAT is any good at predicting who will
benefit most from college?
The correlations between draft position and NFL success (0.33 to 0.52)
are quite similar to the correlations between, say, SAT score and
freshman year in college GPA. Both sets of correlations would be much,
much higher if it weren't for restriction of range -- e.g., pro
quarterbacks are chosen only from college quarterbacks, and Harvard
students are people who got into Harvard.
IQ-denialism is the "rotten core" (to use Stephen Jay Gould's phrase
in a more accurate context) of the modern conventional wisdom. He who
says A must say B, as Lenin liked to say. And Malcolm is naive enough
to illustrate that. Gould, for example, wasn't dumb enough to follow
his logic in Mismeasure of Man to its conclusions (e.g., he taught at
Harvard, which uses IQ-like tests to select Gould's students), but
Malcolm, in contrast, is a true believer.
Gladwell's basic problem is that he doesn't understand normal
probability distributions.
The NFL quarterback problem is, roughly, this. There are about two
million males who turn 22 each year. At, say, four standard deviations
above the mean in current quarterbacking ability, there are 63
individuals, which is about the number of starting quarterbacks who
run out of eligibility each year from Division I or the better lower
division colleges. What NFL teams are doing is looking for the one
individual who will turn out to be five standard deviations above the
mean -- the best NFL quarterback of his age cohort.
Using one single-number measure -- Pro-Fooball.Reference.com's Career
Approximate Value number -- for all the quarterbacks drafted from 1980
through 1999, we see that the first quarterback chosen proved to have
the highest Career Approximate Value out of his draft class nine times
out of 20. (And the "mistakes" include picking John Elway over Dan
Marino; three times the first quarterback chosen proved to have the
second best career of his draft cohort.) On average, almost 14
quarterbacks were chosen each year, so being right 45% of the time is
a lot better than random.
Moreover, the second quarterback drafted turned out to be the best
quarterback of his year five out of 20 times.
To some extent, that measure is biased upward by higher draft picks
being handed more playing time. If we use a higher measure of
excellence, Pro Bowl selections, then the first quarterback picked
wound up with more Pro Bowl honors than anybody else in seven of the
20 drafts, and tied for the most twice (Elway and Marino with 9 each,
and in 1980 none of the 17 quarterbacks drafted ever went to a Pro
Bowl).
Also, quarterbacks who are undrafted and thus don't show up in the
draft database would bias this correlation upward somewhat. To
estimate the impact, I checked the careers of four undrafted QBs who
are inspiring NFL success stories -- Kurt Warner, Jeff Garcia, Jake
Delhomme, and Jon Kitna -- and their inclusion wouldn't change these
results much even if they had been drafted, since they all went
undrafted in years in which the first quarterback drafted wasn't the
best.
Gladwell's innumeracy shouldn't be such a fatal problem for the
articles published under the lucrative Malcolm Gladwell brand name.
Many successful authors have research assistants who help the face of
the organization concentrate on doing what he does best. For example,
I once met the research assistant to the octogenarian crime novelist
Elmore Leonard. The assistant's job was to put in the shoe leather
work scouting locations, studying old newspapers, interviewing people
who have jobs that will feature in the book and so forth, so that
Leonard's novels can have very realistic, very detailed senses of time
and place.
Similarly, Malcolm could well afford to hire a young research
assistant who understands quantitative analysis.
Why doesn't he?"<<
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/11/ny-times-publishes-gladwells-letter-and.html
hoser1605
> NY Times publishes Gladwell's letter and Pinker's response
>
> >> "In the New York Times here.
>
Why. You don't provide any evidence that you do. Give me two
examples of non-parametric tests.