That kick-butt guy in the black wig is me, kung fu-ing the stuffing out of asinine research. Listen to the klaxon clang as evildoers discover we are among them!
Or something.
Don’t know about you guys, but I grow weary of studies like “Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions” by Kerry O’Brien and others. The product of lazy scientists relying on re-re-reanalyzing a set of data.
The set of data arose from a bunch of questions they thought sounded cool—this is how most sociology is conducted—while our crew asked what would happen if they dumped a select few of those questions into a statistical chopper. Wee p-values were ejected. Theories were generated. It’s all so tiring.
In 2008-2009, over four thousand folks were asked if they owned a firearm. 565 said yes, 615 said no; which means three thousand people weren’t asked, or refused to answer, or whatever. Would you tell some white-coated stranger if you had a gun? Depending on the googleyness of his eyes, I might say anything from no to “You better believe it and it’s pointed at you.”
How did our lazy research team account for this kind of measurement answer?
As I like to say, you just wait here for an answer.
Racism dreadfully concerns O’Brien (and most academics): “Blacks are disproportionately represented in US firearm homicides (14.6 per 100,000), and would benefit most from improved gun controls.” A racist statement if there ever was one, and an admission of outright bias.
O’Brien sought to categorize “racism” in two ways. The first was “implicitly”, measured by showing pictures of blacks to whites and asking how the whites felt about it. Since this measure of (almost) real racism didn’t play in their results, we don’t hear much about it their paper.
The second measure was “The Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale” by P. J. Henry and David O. Sears (Political Psychology, 2002, Vol. 23, pp. 253-283). “Symbolic racism (racial resentment) [is] an explicit but subtle form and measure of racism.” They stress this is not “old-fashioned or overt/blatant racism which had seen blacks as amoral and inferior”.
Symbolic “racism”, if it isn’t already obvious, thus means “not racism”. It instead probably means, as you will see, “knowledge of the racial politics.” A screwy thing about the scale is that it is only eight questions, any of which may be used as “the” scale: “the scale could be shortened or lengthened as needed”.
From Henry and Sears, here are four (the final eight were winnowed from many, hence the strange numbering):
2. Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same. (1, strongly agree; 2, somewhat agree; 3, somewhat disagree; 4, strongly disagree)…
9. How much of the racial tension that exists in the United States today do you think blacks are responsible for creating? (1, all of it; 2, most; 3, some; 4, not much at all)
11. How much discrimination against blacks do you feel there is in the United States today, limiting their chances to get ahead? (1, a lot; 2, some; 3, just a little; 4, none at all)…
16. Over the past few years, blacks have gotten more economically than they deserve. (1, strongly agree; 2, somewhat agree; 3, somewhat disagree; 4, strongly disagree)
O’Brien said their team used four of the eight questions, but I couldn’t discover which four. That’s science for you. I did double check, though: “Al Sharpton” was not a legitimate response to number 9. Neither was “Affirmative Action” listed for 16.
Anyway, you get the idea in which direction biased, coddled, gun-shy researchers would think answers are “racist”. There is only one politically correct view; everything else is “racist.”
Those who scored ever-so-slightly higher on the politics/”racism” scale were a tiny bit more likely to admit to strangers to owning a gun. This is not the same as saying those who scored higher on the politics/”racism” scale were a tiny bit more likely to own a gun, because gun ownership was never measured. Recall only a fraction of the respondents had anything to say on the subject of gun ownership.
Racism (“implicitly”) was not statistically important. So how do we explain newspaper headlines like this?
And conclusions like this (from the authors)?
Opposition to gun control in US whites is somewhat paradoxical given the statistics on gun-related deaths, and such opposition may be undermining the public health of all US citizens.
Racism has to be the answer.
” “Blacks are disproportionately represented in US firearm homicides (14.6 per 100,000), and would benefit most from improved gun controls.—
Dr Briggs I’m confused
didn’t the CDC find that violent death amongst young black males was at a 30 year low?
Aren’t most of these murders committed with illegally held weapons, in Urban Areas which already have strict firearms regulations, particularly concerning the pistols with which most of these crimes are committed?
As most Black people who are shot are shot by other black people, wouldn’t targeted action within that community have more leverage on the problem than a general regulation applied to all communities equally?
Surely anyone with even half a brain would take the 5 minutes required to establish these facts before filling out a grant application?
Surely the wise and benificent government, our saviour and protector, guardian of all the money missing from our pay packets, wouldn’t hand out cash via a research grant to a thumb-fingered wuckfit so that he could fail to find convincing evidence to support a pre-determined conclusion. Please Dr Briggs say it isn’t so…
Mike,
It isn’t so. This time.
These guys are from Australia and England. But they still know what’s best for us, just like our government.
Major Briggs — will you be commenting on/explaining to us dolts, this study on P-values etc?
Revised standards for statistical evidence by Valen E. Johnson
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/10/28/1313476110.abstract
“Mine eyes are dim. I cannot see. I did not bring [my data set] with me.” And now, the climate conference engages with dim eyes. Soon comes the politicians. They’ll cleave-up our society into pseudo special interest groups who squabble about the ridiculous. Then, the political elite will sweep in and rescue us from the contrived diatribe and declare a new world order. Let’s see, I’m white, a multi-gun owner, a Texan, a Christian, a climate denier, a veteran, an Engineer, and now a racist. Might be first into the re-education camps.
“Racism dreadfully concerns O’Brien (and most academics): “Blacks are disproportionately represented in US firearm homicides (14.6 per 100,000), and would benefit most from improved gun controls.†A racist statement if there ever was one, and an admission of outright bias.”
It’s a statement they failed to substantiate with analysis and amounts to an editorial comment and statement of belief that is wholly inappropriate in a scholarly research paper. They should have been required to remove the statement before it could have been published, at the very least.
Have you ever noticed that lefties are obsessed with sex, race and money? I believe they have a serious problem with psychological projection. That’s why they are always accusing other people of racism, sexism, greed, homophobia etc. Of course, racism, sexism etc. are made up mental disorders. What’s really going on is if you call somebody racist you are really saying that you are an intellectually and morally superior person and the other person is stupid and evil.
In 2008-2009, over four thousand folks were asked if they owned a firearm. 565 said yes, 615 said no; which means three thousand people weren’t asked, or refused to answer, or whatever.
Should have used a zero-sized sample and gotten cleaner results. But perhaps that would have been too Lew’d even for them.
http://climateaudit.org/2013/11/07/more-false-claims-from-lewandowsky/
DAV,
I have been following the Lew’d affair as well. It is hilarious in itself but the attempts to justify the null set are funny beyond belief. When abuses like this become acceptable we have definitely abandoned all sanity.
Kip,
This is covered at WUWT as well, but until Briggs responds we have the Brownian motion.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/12/raising-the-bar-on-statistical-significance/#comment-1473201
An Engineer: By now you should be accustomed to the stereotype. Need to portray a racist, bigot, woman beater, homophobe, demented low IQ type, sadist, killer, child molester or any other bad type: just get a white guy with a southern accent. Been seeing that for over 40 years. You can also cover the “ghetto” stereotypes that are just as bad. Seems easier to draw predetermined conclusions based on stereotypes than do the difficult work of really analyzing the data.
The questionnaire designed to measure racist attitudes contains the following question:
” Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same. (1, strongly agree; 2, somewhat agree; 3, somewhat disagree; 4, strongly disagree)…”
I am totally baffled as to what conclusion regarding racism one should draw from an answer to this question. In my view the question leaves one with a damned if you do and damned if you don’t choice.
To agree or disagree with first part of the question, one must decide whether the Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. This analysis poses at least three sub questions:
First, did Irish, Italians, and Jews experience racial prejudice? I think that any reasonable person with knowledge of American history would have to say yes. These groups certainly perceived that they experienced racial prejudice in the past.
Did these groups overcome racial prejudice and work their way up? It would seem to me that the obviously correct answer to this question is that some members of these groups were able to overcome prejudice and work their way up, while others did not. I am not sure how one can answer the question with respect to the groups as a whole. One is forced to choose an answer that requires one to apply a racial stereotype: either the groups as a whole overcame racial prejudices and worked their way up (a positive racial stereotype) or the group as a whole did not (a negative racial stereotype)
Next, the question requires one to answer whether “Blacks should do the same”. If one believes that Irish, et.al, overcame prejudice and worked their way up, then I would think that the non-racist answer would be “yes”, blacks should do likewise. There are some extreme racists who would answer “no” because they think either that Blacks do not experience racial prejudice or that they should just “stay in their place” and not attempt to overcome it.
Thus, under one interpretation of the question, the non-racist answer to is to strongly agree. However, there is another way to interpret the question.
One could interpret the question to imply an unstated assumption: that is, while the Irish, et. al have been able to overcome prejudice and work their way up, Blacks have not been able to do this. The statement does not state this assumption expressly, but it does seem to suggest it. If one understands the question to contain this unstated assumption, then If the Irish, et. al were able to overcome racial prejudice and work their way up, but Blacks have not been able to do this, Blacks must be inferior to these other groups. This reading of the question would lead one to believe that the non-racist answer would be to strongly disagree with the statement.
I am curious as to how others interpret this question. Is the non-racist answer to strongly agree or strongly disagree?
From the description of what they measured the most plausible explanation for the results observed was they saw that politically incorrect people who don’t fear public scorn tended to give the ‘wrong answer’ to both the ‘own guns’ question and the ‘racist’ questions.
Oh Dr Briggs, the philosophical smorgasbord that presents itself…..You see an irritating pillock who has decided to commit an act of mental self abuse with the tools of your trade. As a UK taxpayer I see one more tick latched onto my wallet. can relativism be true??? But then from any point of view it seems that the UK Government is paying money to this git, so that he can fail to gather evidence to support a prejudiced input to the US legislative process. If this is all going on in my head, shouldn’t I be able to imagine more convincing crap than this…..????
Should we finally surrender to Menkens call to raise the black flag, spit on our hands and start slitting throats……. 🙂
Dazed and confused…. Michael Ozanne…