OK. Welcome everybody to this week's graduate lecture series lecture, which is going to be given by Professor David Steinfeld's from department. And David is going to cover statistics ethical and unethical and do it by some historical vignettes. So David, please take it away. OK, thank you. So. So I'm anyone who's who's watching. I mean, if anyone is willing to turn on video, it's nice to get that sort of visual feedback while I'm talking, so I don't feel like I'm talking to myself up to you.
OK, so I'm going to I'm going to talk about four mostly unconnected topics. I don't have a big point to make in this talk. These are some episodes from the history of statistics that I've found. People that I think about and thinking about ethical issues and statistics, some of them have. Obvious and some not so obvious ethical implications, I'm not going to be trying to draw out any big point your I'll point out some connexions that arise amongst these topics.
So I'm going to start out talking about the census as kind of the the paradigm of statistical activity and statistical procedure and some issues that have arisen around around census. Not again, not trying to be comprehensive about it. Just some interesting events from from history that one might want to think about.
Talk about then went to spend a while talking about eugenics and how it's connected to the origins of biased statistics, and then talk about the somewhat infamous episode of Ray Fisher and his A.A. tobacco agitation. And then I'm going to if if there's time, I'm going to talk about some of the ways that. Simple statistical concepts particularly relating to the Gaussian distribution pop up and are are sort of weaponized in discussions of public affairs. So you start by talking about the census.
Census have always been controversial in in the Bible, there are several censuses mentioned and one that's gotten a lot of attention. So I'm not going to read through this whole quote that this is a story from the second book of Samuel. We're which starts by that, right, so right. The ward was, you know, the Lord's wrath was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, Go count Israel and Judah.
So, so the census is presented as an act of aggression of a ruler against against the people. And weirdly, the story goes on to say so his his his military commander who who he asked to carry out the census protested. This is again one of these extraordinary things one doesn't ordinarily think of military commanders refusing the orders of the king and said, Well, why would why would we do this? But he insisted, and they went out.
And then immediately when it was done and they give the count of 800000 and 500000 sword wielding men. And then he was immediately regretted having done it, and but it was too late, and God punished the people by sending a plague. Well, actually, he got to choose what his punishment would be. And of the three possibilities. So interestingly, seven day seven years of famine or three months of fleeing from his enemies or three days of plague were seen as reasonably equivalent punishment.
And he chose the plague and seventy seven thousand men died. So I mention this because this was people were very aware of this when there were in the in the 18th century, proposals first came up for actually conducting modern censuses in in England. The first formal proposal for a census was the bill for registering the number of the people. 1753, which was received reasonable approbation to one one MP.
William Thornton protested as to myself, I hold this project to be totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty, and therefore, though it should pass into a law, I should think myself under the highest of all obligations to oppose execution. By the way, I might have had sometimes extensive quotes from the figure.
As I'm talking about, I find it helpful to get the the flavour of the way they were thinking through their language, and annual register of our people will acquaint our enemies abroad with our weakness and the return of the poor rate our enemies at home with our wealth. So OK, so two objections. One is that it? It will be militarily problematic if if the if our enemies knew the size of our population and.
And so who are enemies at home? Well, he goes on to say, right, our enemies at home are policemen and tax masters. So basically, if you if you conduct the census and count people's wealth, then of course that would make it easier to tax them. So so this the bill ended up being voted down and there was no no census conducted the the first. Well, so the first modern census more or less, was conducted in in Sweden.
But what was very influential was that it was written into the United States Constitution that there should be a census every at at minimum, every 10 years, and that these should be used for allocating representation and taxes. And oops, sorry because I wrote 1990. I mean, 1790 have been carried out every 10 years since 1790. And this created quite an impression on.
People who were interested in kind of progressive causes and in particular, the director of the French Bureau of Statistics wrote in 1847, the United States present in its history a phenomenon without parallel that of the people who instituted the statistics of their country the very day they founded their society and who regulated in the same act, the census of their fellow citizens, their civil and political rights and future destiny of the country.
So I want to now say a few things about issues that have come up with the US census. So one is the census of 1840. So the founder of the American Statistical Society, which is now the American Statistical Association, I don't know why it was changed from society to association, wrote an article in the Boston Medical and surgical journal The Predator, the predecessor of what is now the New England Journal of Medicine. An article titled Statistics of Insanity in the United States.
And he noted that the 1840 census they had counted the number of insane and idiots in the respective states. Obviously the wording of the time and he totalled up and they had also counted, counted them by, by, by race. And he found that the rate of insanity was nearly 10 times higher. Sorry. So I left out an important point here. The rate of insanity amongst the black population was nearly 10 times higher in northern than in southern states.
And he concluded. Slavery has a wonderful influence upon the development of moral faculties now, I should say. Wonderful. I think it's not being used entirely modern sense of being excellent or praiseworthy, but not I mean. Right? He's saying it's remarkable. But still, he's not criticising it and the intellectual powers and refusing man, many of the hopes and responsibilities which the free, selfish thinking and self acting enjoy and sustain.
Of course, it saves him from some of the liabilities and dangers of the active self-direction. So he then he then looked at the numbers again and discovered there were some problems. In fact, quite a lot of problems with the census data. Amongst other things. Some towns in New England and indeed other elsewhere in the north had recorded more black, insane residents than total black residents.
There. In addition, there is a question of how a slave or even a southern free black would be recognised as insane. There were there was no prospect of them. Being, you know, coming under, you know, getting medical attention or or being committed to to an asylum there. So there were there were huge problems with the enumeration. And he wrote in 1844 an article essentially saying that none of these numbers can be trusted.
And in fact, the American Statistical Association, which he was the founder of Conducted Investigation, requested that the the census had to be corrected. But these sorts of discoveries have a life of their own. So the the infamous senator, John C. Calhoun, former vice president of the US senator from South Carolina, wrote here, sorry. He said he he said in a speech in the in the Senate here is proof of the necessity of slavery.
The African is incapable of self care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom. It is a mercy to him to give him the guardianship and protection from mental death and.
An article that got quite a lot of attention reflections on the census of 1840, which presented itself as being a very pro black article in favour of the the welfare of black people, said we are not friendly to slavery whenever it can be shown to us of the South that the free blacks of any of the free states or as happy as the slaves, the subject of general emancipation will be entitled to more consideration.
But so long as they furnish little else but materials for jails, penitentiaries and madhouse was warned by such examples. We cannot desire to be the destroyers of the dependent race. The as it happened Calhoun himself shortly after he became secretary of state, who would have been responsible for having the sentence revised and not unsurprisingly, nothing was ever undertaken in that direction. The figures were never corrected, and they continued to be cited.
One of the leading arguments that people like Calhoun referred to in support of the institution of slavery. OK, so one other thing I want to talk about the issue of statistical confidentiality and how that is related to the census, the 1851 Census of Ireland, the form that was sent out to people requesting data, states the information thus obtained will will be published in general abstract only and strict caretaking returns are not used for the gratification of curiosity or other object,
then perfecting the census. Interestingly, this issue of confidentiality was not mentioned in the forms that were sent out in the rest of the UK. But interestingly too, there was actually no basis for this promise of confidentiality. There was no legal basis. There was no law that in any way restricted the way the census data could be used once they were collected until nineteen hundred and.
And B the Hundred Census Act barred unlawful disclosure, but was actually quite vague about what that would constitute, what and how what was and was not allowed. Nonetheless, every ten years with the new census, the assurances of confidentiality became ever stronger. Even while there was no change in the law in the U.S., there was basically no law. So here is an interesting graphic produced by the United States Census Bureau showing the developments related to confidentiality over time.
And it wasn't until 1940 that that confidentiality was written into law. For the U.S. Census, and it was immediately overturned by the second War Powers Act in 1942, which and then resumed after the war, when the act expired. The modern rules governing confidentiality of the in a lawsuit referred to as Title 13, which essentially says has actually quite strict constraints and says results can't be shared with anyone for statistical purposes.
In 2020, requirements of differential privacy were instituted for the census, so. So in 1940, the let's say there the law, the the law required that results be kept confidential. When the Japanese Navy attacked the US at Pearl Harbour and President Roosevelt ordered the internment of Americans of Japanese descent, more than 110000 were sent to camps away from the coast, two thirds of them being U.S. citizens.
There were no population registries in the US, and there has been a longstanding suspicion repeatedly and often vehemently denied by the Census Bureau that Census micro data were used to target the Japanese. The the evidence was somewhat indirect until 2007, when two historians uncovered memos from 1943, specifically requesting and receiving census micro data. In one example, the Treasury secretary.
Requested from the Census Bureau, the names and locations of people of Japanese ancestry living in the Washington, D.C., area who had not been subject to internment because it was only for Japanese on the West Coast. Seven days later, the bureau provided a list of seventy nine Japanese-Americans in the area, including name, address, sex, age, marital status, citizenship status, status, employment and occupation and industry.
And they comment that the rapid replies indicative of an already established administrative process. OK, so that's all I wanted to say about the census. I'll refer back to some of this later, but any questions or comments before I go on.
OK, so now I want to talk about a less controversial topic, the eugenics and the origins of biostatistics in particular has related to three of what anyone must consider the founders of modern statistics, in particular biased statistics Francis Galton, Ari Fisher. And Karl Pierson, here's here's Karl Pierson together with his daughter, Helga, who is actually somewhat, you know, been somewhat been forgotten by history, although she was in her time, a noted palaeontologist and.
Just so and while I'm showing one daughter, I'll show the rest of the the Pearson family. So those of you? So the one that you surely know is Aegon, who the one who worked with name in on the name Pearson, Lemma and then that's Sigrid. The older daughter Maria is white and an unidentified body. So. What is eugenics? It's a cancer free medical specialisation seeking to increase positive heredity, eliminate presumptively heritable diseases, increase fitness of the national race in Germany.
This the tended to be called racial hygiene. But those four seem to have been seen as more or less synonymous terms. So there it tended to be divided into two variants positive eugenics, encouraging favourable marriages between genetically superior pairs and negative eugenics, which was so at the one end that was similar to what now today would be called genetic counselling counselling couples about heritable disease, but also forbidding what was then called miscegenation.
Procreation of mixed race pairs, forced segregation, sterilisation or extreme euthanasia of feeble minded, disabled and alcoholics. All of these which people tended to assume were heritable. And of course, the question of whether they were were not heritable was one of the main objects of research. So this ties into the previous story of Jarvis and the census because the Genesis were obsessed with the feeble minded.
Gordon started his statistical genetics career, analysing how intellectual accomplishments were clustered in notable families. Parenthetically, even though he was a first cousin of Charles Darwin, which he also was somewhat obsessed with, he was very concerned with the educated classes were not having enough children. The population would become less intelligent. He he was particularly concerned about the fact that at that time the the dorms in Oxford and Cambridge were forbidden to marry.
He was not himself. I don't know it wasn't directly affected, but he did have no children himself. And eugenic thinking in the late 19th century was directly descended from attempts in the early 19th century to prove that insanity was hereditary.
And there is. There's an excellent book on this topic. If anyone's interested by Theodore Porter called genetics in the madhouse about the, again, this overwhelming conviction that people had that that madness was was hereditary before there was any clear sense of by hereditary might mean. So let me quickly just remind you of who Francisco who was in his contributions to statistics. So a few of the thing the notions that he introduced was regression, correlation and heritability.
By the way, this this sketch here is from one of his papers, this is the way he originally presented the the the notion of regression to the mean regression to the mean was also a concept that he introduced. I called it regression to mediocrity. He was the founder of biochemistry and psych commentary and also made innovative contributions to branching processes, in particular what's now called the Golden Watson process. So. He is now. What are his contributions to eugenics and scientific racism?
Now I'm going to for each of these people to talk about what what they did in eugenics, and I think it's very natural. People tend to say, well, this is how people were in those days and they probably didn't mean it all white, all like that. And it's probably not. Not really directly connected with their important scientific contributions, anyway, so I'm just going to give a few citations from each of them to show that each of these people was even even given the racist tenor of their times.
They were deeply, deeply racist people. I mean, there are arguments for each of them. In particular, for Fisher, I'll get you about whether he was in some sense, personally racist or kind of on a population level, racist. I'm not going to get into that argument, but and that it was very intimately bound up with the motivations for their science and how they conducted their science. So here is a quote from from Gaul community are relatively early in his career.
He says the history of the world tells a tale of the continental continental displacement of populations, each by a worthy successor and humanity gains thereby. But the countries into which the Anglo-Saxon race can be transfused are restricted to those where the climate is temperate. The tropics are not for us to inhabit permanently. The greater part of Africa now you might stop here and say, Well, I guess he I guess he thinks we should then leave Africa to the Africans.
And but no, I wish to see a new competitor introduced, namely the chinaman. The gain would be immense to the whole civilised world if he were to out breed and finally displace the native Africans. So. He coined the term eugenics in 1883 in his book Enquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.
We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious meeting, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognitive cognisance of all influences attending. However, emoted agree to give more suitable races or streams of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.
The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea. He wrote a popular article, Hereditary Improvement, where he sketches a utopia where the genetic elite would rule and the underclass would be forbidden to procreate on pain of becoming quote enemies to the state and have forfeited all dreams to kind. Well, he founded the Eugenics Record Office 19 04 with a register of noteworthy families, this still exists, but it has been renamed to the Golden Laboratory.
He founded the Eugenics Education Society 1987, which was affiliated with the Berlin Society for Racial Hygiene, and he endowed the professorship in eugenics at UCL. And just because, you know, of course, it had to be there, right? He, he wrote, the Jews are specialised for a parasitical existence upon other nations. Just so OK. So. OK, so that's Carlton Pearson. Pearson was a real racist, I mean, not not like not like golf.
I mean, he. OK, so Bristol here his contribution to statistics, I mean, modern statistics unimaginable without Pearson. These are some of his contributions. So what did Pearson contribute to eugenics and Typekit Grace while he was the first golden professor of eugenics at UCL? Here are some quotes from his 1991 speech National Life from the standpoint of science.
If you bring the white man into contact with the black, you too often suspend the very process of natural selection on which the evolution of a higher type depends. You get superior and inferior races living on the same soil, and that coexistence is demoralising for both.
You will see that my view and I think it may be called the scientific view of a nation is that of an organised whole kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by ensuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war, with inferior races and with equal races by the struggle for trade routes and for the sources of raw material and a food supply.
Let me just say at this moment what right, so these are these are kind of shocking statements, but why am I right? Why do they matter? Well, I think the reason why I think it matters to bring these up is in the title. This is Pearson who, you know, at this point, already a very influential figure and representative of statistics, saying This is the standpoint of science on national identity.
He is. This is how the the authority of Statistical Science was being used and was being promoted to the public, right? This was supposed to be seen as the scientific view, not just Pearson's racist view, but this is what science has proved. The Grammar of Science, an incredibly influential book, as you know, as I said in the previous slide, you know, this was the first book that Albert Einstein selected for his reading group in Zurich in 1992.
This was was seen as the quintessence of modern scientific thinking. The chapter on Biology Ends With It is a false view of human solidarity, a weak humanitarianism, not a true humanism, which regrets that a capable and stalwart race of white men should replace a dark skinned tribe, which can neither utilise its land for the full benefit of mankind nor contributed quota to the common stock of human knowledge.
In his nineteen oh three lecture on the inheritance of mental and moral character, the man and its comparison with the inherent physical characters, he wrote, no training or education can create intelligence. You must read it now. The plot in the lower right hand corner. Is, I think, indicative of Pearson's method, which is shockingly sloppy in. I mean, so no one can suggest that Pearson did not know how to do proper science. So here he has. He he.
This looks like he is presenting, and if I if I get to it at the end, we know that in modern presentations, the the there there's a there's a sense of somehow scientific rigour around the Gaussian distribution in all of this. The bell curve that people don't don't know anything about. Statistics know the bell curve. So, so he seems to be saying, and just as with height and some other characteristics, so intelligence.
So this is right, the distribution of intelligence in 2014, girls looks like it is normally distributed. How interesting. Right. And this is the point he's trying to make. Except what is he actually plotting there, huh? Where did he get measures of intelligence? Well, actually what he had was he sent questionnaires to to schools asking them to simply rank their the their girls in seven categories. Right, and so these are the seven categories, and so they've just been placed on this thought.
There are no numbers here. There simply are seven categories. And he's arranged them together with with a Gaussian distribution, which essentially has nothing to do with with his actual data. He founded the Annals of Eugenics, which the Journal still exists, but renamed itself the annals of human genetics. Its subtitle was for the scientific study of racial problems.
And the first issue, interestingly, had an article by Pearson with the titled The Problem of Alien Immigration into Great Britain, illustrated by an examination of Russian and Jewish and Polish Jewish children, which purported to explain why Jewish migration to Britain would degrade the native population. OK, so that's that's Pearson now. Fisher, uh, so. Ari Fleischer, as contributions were perhaps even more extensive and fundamental than those of Pearson.
Here are some of the things that Fischer introduced into Stat. What about his contributions to eugenics? Well, he was the second called professor of eugenics at UCLA. He was successful person. He early in his career. In fact, while he was still a student, he gave a speech to the Cambridge Eugenics Society. In which he talked about how important it was to for the British race, to improve itself by elucidating the inheritance of mental characters.
And said that with its unquestioned economic and military dominance in the world, Great Britain should be the one to achieve such genetic superiority. And he said, I have almost entirely devoted myself to the two lines of modern research, which are of particular interest in eugenics, that is to biometrics and mendel it. So he was planning his career from the beginning with the purpose of promoting British genetic superiority.
He became the second editor of the Annals of Eugenics, although he did change the subtitle too devoted to the genetic study of human populations. And I think generally you'd have to say Fischer was less openly racist than Ben Pearson. And again, there's this discussion of whether he was more of a population thinker than thinkers once he was a founding member of the Committee for Legalising Eugenic Sterilisation.
He never supported forced sterilisation. He co-authored an article titled Sterilisation of the Unfit in the British Medical Journal, in which he wrote One of us had shown meaning himself that even on the most unfavourable genetic and social assumptions with regard to the effectiveness, the incidence of mental defect would be reduced by as much as 17 percent. In one generation of all, defectives were prevented from having children. So while he didn't support forced sterilisation, prevented.
Certainly sound does not sound all that voluntary. So weird that calculation come from. So the question was right. An important question time was how rapidly could negative eugenics improve the population? Punnet had argued that if you had a Mendelian recessive trait, it would take 22 generations, even if you had a complete bar on reproduction of people showing that trait to reduce the incidence from one and 100 to one in 1000.
Fischer. Criticised that he, first of all, restate so, of course, that the decline is exponential, so he emphasised that in the first generation you would get a 17 percent reduction. That's the number he quoted in that that other article. But then he makes some assumptions about a sort of a meeting and with the comment meeting is very largely controlled by social class, and the feeble minded undoubtedly gravitate to the lowest social stratum and raise the estimate to 36 percent, which.
And then he said this is perhaps about what might be expected from an effective policy of segregation. And it is of a magnitude which no one with a care for his country's future can afford to ignore. He added that 36 percent number obviously was very popular amongst eugenics activists, and now I'm going to put in. So these are these are two graphics that I found actually a photograph them at a display. It be actually at always Alzheimer's former clinic outside Vienna.
So the first is an interesting infographic showing how different kinds of. Families or tend to have different numbers of children. So at the lower right hand, with only one point nine to one point nine children are an academic couple. So it's an educated couple who would say in the upper left is a male criminal, having fought with even without even a woman involved 4.9 children. And then you have on the right, on the upper right, a criminal marriage, I have no idea what that means.
I think it means that marriage to criminals are two anyway. So there's that and then I won't go into. But on the right is an excerpt from a German school maths textbook, giving exactly the kind of arguments that people like Fisher were were putting, putting forward or Pearson with questions like. You know, the construction of a mental asylum cost six million rice marks how many houses for workers at 50000 each could have been built instead.
OK, so that why am I bringing a here, oh, why compare people to Nazis? Everyone hated the Nazis? Well. After the Second World War, most, most of the people involved in eugenics. Rejected turned away from eugenics. Fisher did not, and not only did he not, but he wrote, for instance, wrote a support letter for the de-Nazification of Otmar five Fasher. Now, who was this fellow? Well, he was a renowned international defender of National Socialist Biology.
He was head of the Division of Human Heredity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. He was active in Nazi racial racial politics, and you couldn't make this up. He was the doctoral adviser and continuing collaborator, abusive of Mengele.
Josef Mengele. In case people don't know, the famous Auschwitz doctor famous for his twin studies, which he performed in collaboration with Fisher and Fisher, wrote in 1947, it was, I think, his misfortune rather than his fault that racial theory was a part of the Nazi ideology and that it was therefore of some propaganda importance to the Nazi movement to show that the party supported work of unquestioned value, such as at which one faction was doing in spite of their prejudices.
I have no doubt also that the party sincerely wished to benefit the German racial stock, especially by the elimination of Manifest is such as those deficient mentally and do not doubt that I shall give, as I should have done his support to such a move and so on. Other researchers tried to. So there was an international UNESCO's conference trying to develop an international view on race in the light of what had been learnt from the Nazi experience.
He. So the UNESCO's statement, 1952, said it had never been possible to separate members of two racial groups on the basis of mental capacity, as they can often be separated on the basis of religion, skin colour, hair, family language. It is possible to not prove that some types of innate capacity for intellectual and emotional response are common or in one group than another.
But it is certain that within a single group, innate capacity vary as much as, if not more than they do between different groups. Fisher objected and proposed instead, so this is included in the UNESCO's report. Available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development. And just around it off, he wrote in a letter in 1954.
I am sorry. There should be propaganda in favour of miscegenation in North America, as I'm sure it can do nothing but horror. It's on the basis of this sort of thing that gone from King's College at Cambridge. Removed from its its dining hall, a stained glass window in in honour of Ray Fisher that had been installed about 20 years previously. OK, so that's that's all I'm on eugenics and any questions about that.
OK, so, so because it's taking longer than expected, I'm going to skip over the section on Fisher and Tobacco. I'll just mention that. So, Fisher. So in 1950, Dole and Phil published their famous investigation, a case control study into the link between tobacco and lung cancer and. Interestingly, based on Fisher's exact test. And Fisher.
Fisher objected, so nineteen fifty eight and nine, he wrote several articles in which he offered a. And unbelievably bonkers series of alternative explanations for the data. So one explanation was that if lung cancer associated with smoking, it may be that that lung cancer causes smoking and not vice versa. And he had you had a long explanation for how this this might happen. There may be a genetic predisposition to smoke that also raises the risk of lung cancer.
Time trends and epidemiological data seem to point in the opposite direction, but he actually had no idea how to analyse the those data and. He pointed out some minor possible evidence that smokers who inhale are less likely to develop lung cancer than smokers who don't. So the end basically use this to troll the the researchers and say they should really be advising people that they can prevent lung cancer by inhaling.
So I'm not I'm not going to go into the details on on those, although I'll be happy to answer questions about about them because I wanted to. Get to my my last topic, which are is miscellaneous miss applications, the Gaussian distribution. And I think this is important because it I mean, this is the Gaussian distribution is used both to impose statistical authority and to create a sense of orderliness and determinism.
Now. If people don't know about it, it was a very interesting upwelling of interest in statistics in the early to mid-19th century. So in 1827, the French government started publishing statistics of criminal activity, and people were shocked after getting looking at these for a couple of years and how regular they were from year to year. People were used to thinking of, well, there are statistical regularities in in nature, but not in something as disorderly as criminal activity.
And the so the statistician adult, Keckley, who was extremely influential in promoting statistical ideas in social science at the time, referred to the frightening regularity with which the same crimes are reproduced. Crime is like a budget that is paid with frightening regularity, particular kinds of crimes, insanity and suicide crime crimes, insanity and suicides all repeated year on year. Even the numbers of dead letters in the Paris Post Office and people find it genuinely baffling.
These issues were particularly popularised in England by Henry Thomas Tuchel, who wrote The individual Phelan only carries into effect what is necessary the necessary consequence preceding circumstances. In a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end to their own life. This is the general law and the special question as to who shall commit. The crime depends.
Of course, upon special laws, the offences of men are the result, not so much on the basis of the individual offenders of the state of society. And this was parodied. This was so well known that actually was parodied by Charles Dickens in in hard times. So there is the character Thomas grabbed Grind, who famously starts out the book by saying Facts are all that are needed, and it ends with his son having sorry.
If this is a spoiler for anyone but a son having Rob be the bank that he was working at and explains how how he did it and and then the father said about Thunderbolt had fallen on me, said the father would have shocked me less than this, and the son says, I don't see why so many people are employed in situations of trust. So many people out of many will be dishonest. I have heard you talk 100 times of it being a law. How can I help? What's so? So this is a kind of application of statistics.
That was quite quite popular to present notion of essentially an inevitability that the great society can't be changed there just being these laws that are that are carried out. You can't you can't improve things because the budget will have to be will have to be paid.
In more modern times, you have and so this 1994 book by psychologist and political scientist that created quite a sensation that really harks back in many ways to to to Pearson that makes claims that general cognitive ability is a single quantity generally measurable by IQ tests,
that IQ scores are stable and highly heritable. That this ability largely determines social and economic success in industrialised societies, and that IQ in the US population is declining because of what they refer to as differential fertility. So again, this is these are all claims and concerns that were very familiar from from the previous century of eugenics and subject to a lot of the same problems and issues.
But I think it's particularly interesting why why is this bell curve displayed so prominently? Has nothing directly to do with with the argument, but the claim that there is a right IQ tests or normalised to fit a Gaussian distribution. So this isn't a fact of nature that. That these things are normally distributed. Now it's it it's a reasonable thing to. Way of describing things, but it's not.
But it creates a sense that there's something statistically inevitable about which they're trying to push. And then one last example I want to bring up another big controversy. I've gotten exactly what year this this was. It was about about 20 years ago, Larry Summers, famous economist and at that time, president of Harvard University, but not for much longer after that, precisely because of the controversy around these comments.
He. He was he was asked to speak about women in science, I think he was asked to maybe he just chose to. And he he said that statistics would reveal that Kowboits are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, and white men are substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. So, in other words, no surprise that some groups are underrepresented in some areas of endeavour.
I should mention is. Bothered when people say statistics would reveal, because the honestly are no available statistics, for instance, about the number of Jews in farming and agriculture, and there is actually a very active Jewish farmers network that had over 300 attendees at its most recent gathering. And honestly, you know, the number of Jews in the US is small. The number of farmers is small, so I don't know how many if they actually are underrepresented.
But in any case, he he went on to make an argument, which he says it does appear that on many, many different human attributes height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ mathematical ability, scientific ability.
There is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference means, there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and a female population, and that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly culturally determined, and then goes on to say, Well, you know, in it science departments at Harvard, where you're going to have people who are way,
way out in the tails of the distribution to a bigger standard deviation just means it's going to be more out there, even if the groups are an average equal. Now what is he trying to say here? Well, he's trying to say, don't call me a sexist because I'm not saying men are on average better because we all know that sexism and racism, all those things are about claiming that groups are different on average. I'm just saying men are kind of wonky.
There's, you know, there's there's they're just more spread out. Now, two things that one can say about this, but I'd be interested to hear if people have other comments to make. One thing is. There is no difference between the claim that he's disclaiming and the claim that he's making, because if you say that there are men who are super geniuses more than women and there are also men who are super idiots more than women, those likely had simply had two very different explanations.
And so the fact that there are the super idiots may balance out your calculation, but honestly, it just doesn't matter. It's just not changing your explanation. So he's treating it using this word standard deviation to say, here I've got a technical thing to say here. It's just standard deviation. It's not anything we can do something about, just standard deviation. And then one other thing this is my last slide. This argument is very old and has very dark roots.
So here is a an excerpt from one of the first texts on statistics on the theory of statistics from Gustaf and Wimbledon. Sorry testing on statistics in German in 1863. In which he wrote in the natural realm, each entity is typical in the human world individual. Just as reality has no leaps or abrupt boundaries, so this transition, in fact, is smooth. No grain of sand, no blade of grass and so on is precisely identical.
And yet, even within each such example, there are so many conspicuous gradations, the higher we climb in the progressive series of organisation, the more numerous are the combinations that offer scope for individual deviations. Even within the human world, we see the same series of gradations. The Barbarian is more like its type in the civilised man the black.
After getting the Mongol less than the Caucasian, the eight ancient people more than the mediaeval and still more than the modern, a man is more individual man, a woman the grown up more than the child, the educated more than the uneducated, the aristocrat more than the commoner.
This claim of being more variable, I mean, that is a fundamentally privileged claim to claim it's a it is a claim that has repeatedly been made by sexist by racists, saying that those who are superior just have so many ways of being different, whereas the the underclass, they're all the same. And and again, they write it gets dressed up in, you know, with Gaussian distributions and all that, but it's still the same. OK, so that's it. Thanks for listening.
And yeah, so sorry, I've used a little more time than I plan to, but that's happy to take questions or have discussion. Great, thank you so much, David.