From: Chris Hibbert (chris@pancrit.org)
Date: Sun Oct 20 2002 - 19:04:59 MDT
> [Les Earnest] pointed out that the correlation is less than 1.
> "Extremely low" suggests that it is below 0.1. Nothing that I
> have read suggests that it is below 0.9.
I'll admit that I haven't seen statistics to back up my sense of
agreement with Les' points. His arguments and my experience were
enough to convince me of the validity of his points. Can you point to
credible statistics that show that the correlation between the
categories produced when Americans self-categorize according to any
common system and the underlying genetics (in any reasonable sense) is
higher than .8?
> It seems to confirm my guess that you are claiming that the existence of
> noise in data shows that the data have a signal to noise ratio of zero.
That's a strong overstatement. I'm surprised that you would believe
(or merely suggest) that I reason that erratically.
I believe (subject to challenge, of course) that there's so much noise
in the data we're discussing and so little analysis has been done so
that conclusions based on the data should not be trusted.
Chris
-- It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but not so easy to turn fish soup back into an aquarium. -- Lech Walesa on reverting to a market economy. Chris Hibbert Chris@pancrit.org http://discuss.foresight.org/~hibbert
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