Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: Heil Hitler! Congratulations to your victory! Our victory!
Stupid Donald Trump Follower: Hey, what the FiretrUCK, don’t do that. The walls have ears.
Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: But The Donald has won! Free speech again. Let’s turn on the gas!
Stupid Donald Trump Follower: Please, no, it’s not that easy. The gas chambers have to wait until after the wall. Be careful. Look, that lovely liberal Lisa long leg I told you about is here – she just went out to have a number two, will be back any second – don’t tell her that you are a Heil Hitler screaming Nazi – and watch your arm – just a handshake – no staring at her legs either!
Lovely Liberal Lisa: Hey there, another one wearing healthy sandals – good to see more progressive minds around – like to join me arguing against this stupid Donald Trump follower here?
Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: Ah, my boots are at the cleaner’s after curb stomping that …
Stupid Donald Trump Follower: Ok, ha ha, lovely joke, now back to that graph. We were discussing these graphs that summarize the SAT scores that tell us that Black children of parents with graduate degrees have lower SAT scores than White children of parents with a high-school diploma or less.
Lovely Liberal Lisa: I do not believe these data before I do not have an acceptable explanation. It stinks of systemic racism miles against the wind.
Stupid Donald Trump Follower: Lisa is worried because the data destroy the claim that Blacks perform worse on grounds of their economic situation. Lisa thinks that Black kids have less access to libraries and less money to take SAT prep courses. The data show that Black students from families earning more than $70k score lower than Whites whose families earned less than $10k.
Lovely Liberal Lisa: He only focuses on Affirmative Action. So predictable – White male afraid of losing his privilege.
Stupid Donald Trump Follower: I say that IQ is somewhat genetic. Families with a more intelligent genetic makeup tend to earn more and have better SAT scores. Looking for example at the right of the graph, that Blacks there earn as much and obtain the same degrees awarded in spite of performing on average worse by a whole standard deviation, well, that is simply due to Affirmative Action.
Lovely Liberal Lisa: Gee, do you hear that? Now he even really blames it on genes! I don't believe it.
Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: Yes, that is just a little too simplistic. A naïve view of the world as it befits a mere Donald Trump follower. There might be some Affirmative Action here, but I don’t think that is the main reason.
Lovely Liberal Lisa: Ha – see!
Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: Look, the genes do not determine IQ like this!
Lovely Liberal Lisa: Precisely! Give it to him!
Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: The children of two people with relatively low intelligence are not likely to have also that low intelligence. It is called ‘Regression to the Mean’. The genes are remixed in every generation. You Donald Trump lovers have to be more careful with the science!
Lovely Liberal Lisa: Exactly – the science! They are enemies of science.
Stupid Donald Trump Follower: Well what is your explanation then?
Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: Regression to the Mean! You do not understand anything about immigration for example if you do not understand Regression to the Mean. Let me put another line into your graph.
Stupid Donald Trump Follower: What the hell is this supposed to be?
Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: The blue line is perhaps more representative of the data if they are not split by race. There are more Blacks with lower income, and vice versa, more Whites than Blacks with high income.
Lovely Liberal Lisa: That is a good point. The blue line does not hide the polarization into the one-percenters versus the sorry rest. The steepness of the line emphasizes the opening of the scissors between the haves and the have-nots.
Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: Ah - no, actually, the flatness does, but anyway. Concentrate on the White line. At the high end, the performance is as expected from the White racial mean and so the children are on average as intelligent as the parents and have high SAT scores. At the low end, the parents perform worse than the mean of the White race, but the children, because of the reshuffling of their parent’s genes and its likely 'Regression to the Mean', well, they perform still relatively high on the SAT scale. Those children do not perform as badly as the blue line predicts on grounds of their parents’ low income.
Lovely Liberal Lisa: What – what are you talking about? Are you making fun of him? I don’t get the joke.
Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: Well, let’s concentrate on the Black line. At the low end, the performance is as expected from the Black mean and so the children have on average the same intelligence as the parents and a correspondingly low SAT score. At the high end, the parents perform better than the characteristic, biologically adjusted and quite fixed mean of their race. Therefore, their children, because of the reshuffling of their parent’s genes, well, they suffer 'Regression to the Mean' and therefore do not get the SAT scores that the blue line would predict on grounds of their parents’ income alone. Lisa?
Stupid Donald Trump Follower: Oh boy – I think you triggered her. She started shaking and ran out just now as you were pointing around at the graph. She probably hurried to a campus safe-space to throw up like the last time when I tried to explain standard deviations to her. Damn it, lovely Lisa long-leg – this time she is not going to ever come back. I really thought I have a chance there.
Heil Hitler Screaming Nazi: Ah, just grab her by the …
Stupid Donald Trump Follower: No!!!
Oh darn – this did not go down as planned. Dear readers! This is a science site. I know you are all smart and educated and into science, and I have shown you how easy it is to do such statistics even with excel spreadsheets – you can all do it! The data are out there, so please help us as academic boot-licking leaves me little time these days:
1) Please calculate how much 'Regression to the Mean' could possibly contribute. Surely, Heil Hitler screaming Nazis must be completely wrong.
2) If you are not able to do such simple science, please at least try something on the ridiculously low level usual for tenured faculty positions and argue something that could be published in a respected peer reviewed learned sociology or psychology journal for example, some sort of silly framing that helps lovely liberal Lisa sticking to her beliefs.
And here the next Lovely Liberal Lisa Long Leg Science Comic for the Trump age, and even the third one is out already: About geometrical shapes in higher dimensional spaces!
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