(August 23, 2025 at 7:42 pm)GrandizerII Wrote: The tendency for only the brightest philosophy majors to take the LSAT or the GRE was also examined, and they did not find any statistical evidence that this would have mattered to the validity of this study.
They didn't find any statistical evidence because they never went and looked. All they ever did was say 'Nah, didn't happen. Let's move on.' They looked for something they called "interaction" without ever even describing what that is, much less how they tested for it. Then they just go on to say that there isn't any. There's no way for anybody reading that paper to decide for themselves if there is or isn't, because we have no idea how they decided that.
Whenever you see your stats returning glowing praise like their diagrams show, you need to be very, very careful. Odds are very good that you're doing something wrong and your data is contaminated with nasty, nasty artifacts. The real world simply doesn't behave like that. It's horrifyingly messy and on a bright day, you get data that's good enough to draw a line through. When your data supports your conclusions this impressively, a good researcher goes and does some very thorough statistics. If only to make the "I told you so!" much more rigorous.
