Knocking The Gods Of Materialism Off Their Plinths - "Statistics, as a lens through which scientists investigate real-world questions, has always been smudged by the fingerprints of the people holding the lens."

IT WAS THROUGH THE ERECTION OF PROBABILITY AS A CREATOR GOD  within theoretical physics and cosmology that first clued me into the fact that modern, scientistic atheists do, in fact, believe in gods as long as they are mindless, stupid gods of their own creation.   I have, through the witness and testimonials of atheists identified a number of those, probability, perhaps part of an atheist trinity that embodies that one along with random chance and some vague power granted to mathematics by them, in general, father son and holy ghost.  And as I have long suspected biology of adopting natural selection as a rival creator god out of envy for the status of the physics of the 19th century,  I have actually discovered that many atheists assign divine powers to that theoretical "force" and to DNA and, depending on which sect of the biological Lords of Creation they belong to, RNA - disembodied gods which don't seem to be like the real things which are not creators or nearly independent but biologically active molecules which rely on complex cellular chemistry and biology to function.

I came across a note I'd made a long time ago about the slogan that the British journal Annals of Eugenics used,  a quote from Charles Darwin, one that added luster to its claims of "mathematical objectivity," a quote which, given the actual paucity of even the possibility of measurements being made to demonstrate the reality of natural selection in the ancient past, is rather ironic, “I have no Faith in anything short of actual measurement and the rule of three.”   I had, while reading Darwin, noted how little math he seems to have used to make his arguments for natural selection, somewhere, as I mentioned, even Karl Pearson noted that Darwin had little in the way of scientific evidence to back up his claims.   Something which a numbers man like Pearson would have had to have noticed.

In the book The Cult of Statistical Significance, How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives By Deirdre N. McCloskey, Stephen Thomas Ziliak, Steve Ziliak, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, it says:

A century and a half ago Charles Darwin said he had "no Faith in anything short of actual Measurement and the Role of Three,"  by which he appeared to mean the peak of arithmetical accomplishment in a nineteenth-century gentleman, solving of x in "6 is to 3 as 9 is to x."  Some decades later, in the early 1900s, Karl Pearson shifted the meaning of the Rule of Three - "take 3sigma [three standard deviations] as definitely significant" - and claimed it for his new journal of significance testing Biometrika.  Even Darwin late in life seems to have fallen into the confusion, Francis Galton [1822-1911], Darwin's first cousin, mailed Darwin a variety of plants.  Darwin had been thinking about point estimates on the heights of self- and cross-fertilized plants that depart three "probable errors" or more from the assumed hypothesis, a difference in height significant at about the 1 percent level.  

But the gentlemanly faith in the New Rule of Three was misplaced.  A statistically significant difference at the 1 percent level (an estimate departing three or more standard deviations from after Fischer, we call the null) may for purposes of botanically or evolutionary significance be of zero. importance (cf. Fisher 1935, 27-41).  That is, of some cause of natural selection may have a high probability of replicability in additional samples but be trivial.  Yet, on the other hand, a cause may have a low probability of replicability but be important.  This is what we mean when we say a test of significance is neither necessary nor sufficient to a finding of importance.  In significance testing the substantive question of what matters and how much has been translated into a 0 to 1.0 probability, regardless of the nature of the substance, probabilistically measured. 

The consequences of the atheist, allegedly atheistic faith in probability, divorced from the actual observation and rigorous analysis of not only the numbers but the actual substance and nature of what is allegedly being measured does, indeed, cost lives, as I've argued here on the basis of the use of his clearly antisemtic, racist statistical analysis of clearly racist gathering of data on Polish and Russian Jews in 1920s England, Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul entered themselves and Darwinist science into the trail notes to the Shoah.    It was a faith that denied something else quoted in the book, a short bit after that passage.

 "Statistical 'significance' by itself is not a rational basis for action."  W. Edward Demming

Though as the book shows, science, especially those sciences alleged to deal with matters of life and death, the minds of people, their actions in society, in that particular passage the most unlikely of all such as are allowed to call themselves scientists, economists, other rational bases for action being hard to get and prone to wildly unscientific levels of subjective motivation, pretty much put all their faith in the numbers, nevermind what the alleged data actually show.

I was, perhaps, prepared for that by a discussion I had with a very accomplished, very principled, very honest biologist discussing the Marc Hauser scandal and how scandalized I was to hear that those scientists who reviewed his many dishonest papers and up-voted them before publication never actually looked at the films of tamarin behavior he was allegedly describing to see if they showed what he claimed they did.  She told me that reviewers never look at that kind of thing, they only look at the text of the paper to see if it holds together as a mathematical and reasoned claim.   Which I'd never known before was the . . . um. . . "standard" that scientific review was based on.  Which hardly seems like a realistic standard of review that gets called that.  Perhaps another such god is the integrity of science, itself.  

In the case of Karl Pearson, his teacher and mentor Francis Galton, Charles Darwin and others, their use of the faith in numbers to promote their racism, their bigotry, their class and economic interests through science both natural selection (founded on the economic theories of Malthus which more or less, thus, inserted the political and legal fictions of the British class system as an atavistic natural force, little critiqued by the aristocratic Brits who controlled science) and the consequences of their use of the gods of statistics and probability had far reaching consequences up to and including cutting many people out of the future and their own present. 

I didn't see this 2020 article  "How Eugenics Shaped Statistics
Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers,"until looking around last night but it would seem that people are finally waking up to some of the things warned  about here for the past dozen and more years in this regard.  

In early 2018, officials at University College London were shocked to learn that meetings organized by “race scientists” and neo-Nazis, called the London Conference on Intelligence, had been held at the college the previous four years.

The existence of the conference was surprising, but the choice of location was not. UCL was an epicenter of the early 20th-century eugenics movement—a precursor to Nazi “racial hygiene” programs—due to its ties to Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, and his intellectual descendants and fellow eugenicists Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher. In response to protests over the conference, UCL announced this June that it had stripped Galton’s and Pearson’s names from its buildings and classrooms. After similar outcries about eugenics, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies renamed its annual Fisher Lecture, and the Society for the Study of Evolution did the same for its Fisher Prize. In science, these are the equivalents of toppling a Confederate statue and hurling it into the sea.

Unlike tearing down monuments to white supremacy in the American South, purging statistics of the ghosts of its eugenicist past is not a straightforward proposition. In this version, it’s as if Stonewall Jackson developed quantum physics. What we now understand as statistics comes largely from the work of Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, whose names appear in bread-and-butter terms like “Pearson correlation coefficient” and “Fisher information.” In particular, the beleaguered concept of “statistical significance,” for decades the measure of whether empirical research is publication-worthy, can be traced directly to the trio.

Ideally, statisticians would like to divorce these tools from the lives and times of the people who created them. It would be convenient if statistics existed outside of history, but that’s not the case. Statistics, as a lens through which scientists investigate real-world questions, has always been smudged by the fingerprints of the people holding the lens. Statistical thinking and eugenicist thinking are, in fact, deeply intertwined, and many of the theoretical problems with methods like significance testing—first developed to identify racial differences—are remnants of their original purpose, to support eugenics.

It’s no coincidence that the method of significance testing and the reputations of the people who invented it are crumbling simultaneously. Crumbling alongside them is the image of statistics as a perfectly objective discipline, another legacy of the three eugenicists. Galton, Pearson, and Fisher didn’t just add new tools to the toolbox. In service to their sociopolitical agenda, they established the statistician as an authority figure, a numerical referee who is by nature impartial, they claimed, since statistical analysis is just unbiased number-crunching. Even in their own work, though, they revealed how thin the myth of objectivity always was. The various upheavals happening in statistics today—methodological and symbolic—should properly be understood as parts of a larger story, a reinvention of the discipline and a reckoning with its origins. The buildings and lectures are the monuments to eugenics we can see. The less visible ones are embedded in the language, logic, and philosophy of statistics itself.

I hope that in the near future the actual dangers of the artificial, British class system originating god of natural selection - the god of Galton, Pearson and Fisher (who was, atypically of such guys, a member of the Church of England) becomes more discussed because as long as natural selection is the ruling and controlling ideology of the science of evolution, as long as the religious faith in probability is matched with slack and lazy and opportunistic practices in such loosely identified sciences is around, the history cited in that article will repeat itself.  It is no shock to find it embedding things like racism into science because its own origins were in the self-interested bigotry of the British class system.

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If I'd really wanted to be mean I'd have worked in the endorsement of Marc Hauser from the modern, university-based expert in ersatz morality, Peter Singer who called his work, "a major contribution to an ongoing debate about the nature of ethics.”  Which could be because Hauser's claims backed up Singer's atheist ideology in which "ethics" must be seen as a product of natural selection.   Which doesn't do a single thing to confirm its reality.  Karl Pearson and Francis Galton shared that faith in the degraded status of morality.