chadn737

Red Herring. You are digging yourself in a hole Acme by insisting on this logical fallacy. It very illogical. Once again...actual arguments to address: 1) RWA fails to correlate with alternative measures of authoritarianism, but does correlate with alternative measures of conservatism. Logically, one must conclude that RWA does not measure authoritarianism and is simply another measure of conservatism. 2) The language used in the RWA (the actual questions used being referenced) inherently presume an association of right-wing beliefs with authoritarianism. This is reflected in the absence of non-authoritarian right wing beliefs in the questionairre or corresponding authoritarian left-wing beliefs. 3) The questions in the RWA are exclusively focused on a very narrow set of right wing beliefs of a particular moral/social nature. 4) The RWA does not correlate with other tests that you have proposed, such as the SDO. 5) The meta-analysis conlfates multiple measures that are not all equivalent (F-scale, C-scale, RWA, voting records). 6) Many of the reported associations (particularly in the meta-analysis) have small effect sizes.

How is it relevant to the arguments I have made? If its not, then its a red herring. You do understand the concept of a red herring fallacy....correct? Once again...actual arguments to address: 1) RWA fails to correlate with alternative measures of authoritarianism, but does correlate with alternative measures of conservatism. Logically, one must conclude that RWA does not measure authoritarianism and is simply another measure of conservatism. 2) The language used in the RWA (the actual questions used being referenced) inherently presume an association of right-wing beliefs with authoritarianism. This is reflected in the absence of non-authoritarian right wing beliefs in the questionairre or corresponding authoritarian left-wing beliefs. 3) The questions in the RWA are exclusively focused on a very narrow set of right wing beliefs of a particular moral/social nature. 4) The RWA does not correlate with other tests that you have proposed, such as the SDO. 5) The meta-analysis conlfates multiple measures that are not all equivalent (F-scale, C-scale, RWA, voting records). 6) Many of the reported associations (particularly in the meta-analysis) have small effect sizes.

How is it relevant to the arguments made? Do you intend to actually address the arguments or persist in a red herring fallacy. Once again...the actual arguments made: 1) RWA fails to correlate with alternative measures of authoritarianism, but does correlate with alternative measures of conservatism. Logically, one must conclude that RWA does not measure authoritarianism and is simply another measure of conservatism. 2) The language used in the RWA (the actual questions used being referenced) inherently presume an association of right-wing beliefs with authoritarianism. This is reflected in the absence of non-authoritarian right wing beliefs in the questionairre or corresponding authoritarian left-wing beliefs. 3) The questions in the RWA are exclusively focused on a very narrow set of right wing beliefs of a particular moral/social nature. 4) The RWA does not correlate with other tests that you have proposed, such as the SDO. 5) The meta-analysis conlfates multiple measures that are not all equivalent (F-scale, C-scale, RWA, voting records). 6) Many of the reported associations (particularly in the meta-analysis) have small effect sizes.

Pardon me; Ray. As I said I'm typing hastily due to a storm. 'Ray's' bias is no more a red herring than your continuing whine about Altemeyer's bias. I won't address anything until you say whether you have read -or intend to read- Altemeyer's book. Red herring. This is completely irrelevant to the arguments made. Do you understand the concept of a red herring? It is an attempt to introduce an irrelevant issue to distract from arguments made. Let me reiterate the arguments made against the RWA scale, the meta-analysis, and other claims so that you can address the actual argument: 1) RWA fails to correlate with alternative measures of authoritarianism, but does correlate with alternative measures of conservatism. Logically, one must conclude that RWA does not measure authoritarianism and is simply another measure of conservatism. 2) The language used in the RWA (the actual questions used being referenced) inherently presume an association of right-wing beliefs with authoritarianism. This is reflected in the absence of non-authoritarian right wing beliefs in the questionairre or corresponding authoritarian left-wing beliefs. 3) The questions in the RWA are exclusively focused on a very narrow set of right wing beliefs of a particular moral/social nature. 4) The RWA does not correlate with other tests that you have proposed, such as the SDO. 5) The meta-analysis conlfates multiple measures that are not all equivalent (F-scale, C-scale, RWA, voting records). 6) Many of the reported associations (particularly in the meta-analysis) have small effect sizes.

You are trying to introduce several red herrings here and are deliberately ignoring the arguments made while persisting in your use of ad hominem attacks on John Ray. By the way, this is the 3rd or 4th time now you have called him "Jay" which is not his name. You can either address the actual arguments I have made or concede the issue. Let me reiterate those arguments: 1) RWA fails to correlate with alternative measures of authoritarianism, but does correlate with alternative measures of conservatism. Logically, one must conclude that RWA does not measure authoritarianism and is simply another measure of conservatism. 2) The language used in the RWA (the actual questions used being referenced) inherently presume an association of right-wing beliefs with authoritarianism. This is reflected in the absence of non-authoritarian right wing beliefs in the questionairre or corresponding authoritarian left-wing beliefs. 3) The questions in the RWA are exclusively focused on a very narrow set of right wing beliefs of a particular moral/social nature. 4) The RWA does not correlate with other tests that you have proposed, such as the SDO. 5) The meta-analysis conlfates multiple measures that are not all equivalent (F-scale, C-scale, RWA, voting records). 6) Many of the reported associations (particularly in the meta-analysis) have small effect sizes. ......you have not actually addressed any of these arguments, all of which have been supported by published research, examination of Altemeyer's own methodology, and established statistical methodology. Your counter argument has been to resort to ad hominem and appeal to motive fallacies on John Ray, the introduction of red herrings, and also your own argument from repetition. I suggest you address the actual arguments I have made and then we can have a real discussion.

The questionnaire in question IS the RWA questionaire...I'm using Altemeyer's own scale....its not cherrry picking to use the very scale the author himself created and used in most of his work. The social dominance orientation scale (SDO) is not the same as a measure of authoritarianism. Rather it is meant to predict a desire for social dominance (for that individual or for a group)....although this is problematic as the exact interpretation has changed overtime and some have argued that the variations of the scale do not measure the same thing or even hypothesis. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00400.x/abstract Secondly, there is VERY WEAK correlation between Altemeyer's RWA and the SDO. The correlation betwen the two is only ~r=0.18 http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/0022-3514.67.4.741 In fact, studies that measure SDO and RWA and their connection to prejudice show that the two are independent variables that are additive in nature rather than being interactive. This of course makes clear sense if one remembers that the two are very weakly correlated. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2006.00531.x/abstract The "context" of this quote from Altemeyer's book doesn't support your argument as you think it does. The SDO is not an independent scale of authoritarianism. Altemeyer is rather talking about independent tests that predictive of prejudice....but as the last paper I cite shows, this is NOT because SDO and RWA are related, but because the two are additive in an independent way. This completely undermines your argument, because the independence of SDO and RWA shows that the SDO is not a substitute or independent validation of what the RWA is attempting to measure. No, you are not applying my "own measures" you are applying fallacious arguments: appeal to motive and ad hominem attacks. I claim Altemeyer's test is biased based on the actual questions of the test and what it sets out to measure. My standards of bias are based on the actual methods that underly the RWA. Your argument is premised on John Ray (not "Jay") as a person and completely ignore the actual analysis conducted by John Ray. The two are not equivalent. I attack the methods, a valid form of scientific and logical argumentation. You attack a person, a classic fallacy.

There is an easy way to test Altemeyer and one that does not involve self-reference. We can see whether his scale correlates to other scales. As I mentioned earlier...which seems to have gone unnoticed...John Ray early on tested this very thing by comparing Altemeyer to two seperate scales. The first which was set up to measure authoritarian behavior independent of politics and the second set up to measure "conservatism" independent of any notion of "authoritarianism". Altemeyer's test fails to correlate to alternative measures of "authoritarianism" (r=-0.049), but correlates strongly with alternative measures of conservatism. As John Ray points out, this means that Altemeyer's scale is simply a measure of conservatism and not at all a measure of authoritarianism. Ultimately, it just points to the inherent bias in the questions and assumptions of Altemeyer's tests. His questsions are slanted with inherent presumptions of authoritarianism regarding "right-wing" positions and biased in such a way as that any politically left answer is presumed to be "non-authoritarian" while any politically right answer is presumed to be authoriarian. This is the worst sort of biased research, one where the experiments themselves are set up in such a way as to pretty much guarantee the desired outcome. You are committing an ad hominem fallacy at the moment as well as an appeal to motive. John Ray's argument against Altemeyer's RWA scale is based on a testable comparison to alternative scales, all which are also published and peer-reviewed. My own arguments have been based on the nature of Altemeyer's scale and the questions themselves. It is legitimate to call into question the the wording of the questions and whether those questions are biased or slanted towards achieving a certain result, it is not a valid argument to dismiss Altemeyer on his own politics. You are attacking John Ray personally and whatever his politics may be rather than addressing the actual argument and methods he has used. If Altemeyer is indeed measuring authoritarianism, then shouldn't his scale actually correlate to alternative measures of authoritarianism? How can one verify Altemeyer's methods if they do not correlate or correspond to independent means of validation? The alternative scale does not reference politics and thus is free of the potential bias that can exist in Altemeyer's scale which presumes a connection between the politics and the authoritarianism in the questions themselves. Its really impossible to avoid the obvious fact that the RWA questions are worded in such a way as to presume that authoritarianism and right-wing politics are inherently connected.

If you have read discussions of their validity, then I'm sure you are also familiar with John Ray's comparison of Altemeyer's RWA to seperate scales of conservatism and authoritarianism? John Ray developed two different scales. One attempts to measure "Authoritarianism" in a politically unbiased manner. The second is meant to measure "conservatism", but using a mix of questions that reflect both "authoritarian" and "non-authoritarian" aspects of the political right. John Ray then correlated results of Altemeyer's scale with these two separate scales. The expectation being, if Altemeyer's scale actually measures both conservatism and authoritarianism, then it will correlate with both scales to some degree. That was not the case. While RWA has high correlation with Ray's conservatism scale, it actually has zero correlation with the authoritarianism scale (r=-0.049). This work shows that the RWA does not actually measure "authoritarianism." http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224545.1985.9922883#preview Indeed, we have other studies that call it into question, see the work of John Ray above who showed that there is absolutely no correlation with Altemeyer's RWA with an alternative measure of "authoritarianism". I'm not exactly sure what you are getting at, but it seems to missunderstand the importance of "effect size" vs "statistical significance". All statistical significance indicates when comparing two groups is that there is enough difference or low enough variability compared to some null distribution to say that there is a low probability (determined by a predefined threshhold) that these differences occurred by chance alone. It DOES NOT mean that the differences are important in terms of having a meaningful effect. The effect size tells you the maginitude....how big....the impact of that difference really is. I do lots of gene expression studies. Using a standard cutoff of p < 0.05 after multiple testing correction you will often find many differences....but not all are that meaningful. There can be a big difference between a gene that is induced 1000 fold verus one that is induced say 0.5 fold. In genetics, we often measure the contribution of individual genes towards explaining the variance of a phenotype. You will sometimes find genes that contribute large amounts...in some cases 100%....of the observed variation. These genes have large effect sizes. You will oftentimes find genes of small effect, some contributing < 1% of the variance. All are statistically significant, but some are biologically more important and meaningful in explaining the variation. Something with a small effect size.....you could be making a pretty big deal about something that really explains very little, even if it managed to pass some statistical threshold. All that p-value tells you is that you were able to detect a difference....doesn't tell you what the difference means or how important that difference really is towards explaining what you are trying to understand. For that...you really need other measures like effect size. Here is some information on effect size. http://www.statisticshell.com/docs/effectsizes.pdf

1) You are shifting the burden of proof and introducing a red herring. It is not necessary for me to produce a counter-set of "unbiased" questions to show that the questions Altemeyer uses are inherently biased. We only need ask whether or not the questions he uses assume a particular political slant and do the questions encompass the breadth of that political slant. Either one of these can introduce bias. By limiting the scope of his questions to a narrow set of positions held by some within that political orientation, the test is biased towards finding only a very narrow and specific type of authoritarianism. Its a classic case of cherry-picking. As I demonstrated earlier, the questions can be altered to include certain non-authoritarian questions which would lead to very different conclusions. 2) "Unbiased" questions are easily produced. For instance: A) "People should obey the law even if they disagree with it" B) "Certain institutions possess moral authority" C) "Protest is never justified" D) "Under some circumstances it is ok to break the law" E) "Superiors should be obeyed" ........etc These questions are general, they make no presumption about a person's political attitudes, religious beliefs, etc. One could easily ask such questions, guage the "authoritarianism" and then match such data after the fact to self-proclaimed political attitudes, behaviors, etc. In this way the test is not biased a priori to achieve a specific result. 3) Of course if you ask questions that are biased in such a way towards a certain to political belief and then ask people to self-identify, you are more likely to find a correlation between the two. Thats why the results, the questionaire, are biased. They are specifically designed to be more likely to produce results that confirm the hypothesis. Your arguments here are really lacking. You need to show that these questions are NOT biased. I have pointed out how the questions language and nature are inherently geared towards a priori assumptions about the nature of the right and left wing. I have shown how altering the question can easily done to be more likely to produce authoritarian answers the Left and non-authoritarian answers from the Right. I have even provided examples of politically unbiased questions. I have done my part in showing the inherent bias of Altemeyer's scale. You now have to show that its not. If you agree that there is evident bias in the nature of Altemeyer's questions, then you and I can actually agree then that his results are going to be biased and should therefore be questioned. After all.....to acknowledge a biased nature in the wording of the questionaire and try to justify the results after the fact is pretty much an admission that one is willing to accept biased results that conform to one's own prejudices.

If what I say is true, the Altemeyer's questions are biased to achieve a desired outcome and are therefore relevant. The questions can be viewed here: http://www.panojohnson.com/automatons/rwa-scale.xhtml There is an inherent bias in the questionaire to ask only questions of a certain religious/moral nature where agreement in any way is associated with "authoritarianism". Non-authoritarian questions associated with the right-wing in English speaking nations are completely absent as are any questions related to left-wing authoritarianism. For instance, take a question such as this: "You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting for women’s abortion rights, for animal rights, or to abolish school prayer." If reworded to be "You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting to save lives from abortion or to lower taxation", you would get a VERY different answer from someone of a left-wing persuasion. Or consider a question regarding gun ownership and government regulation: "The government has the right to limit ownership of guns and we need a strong leader to restrict gun ownership amongst private citizens". Agreement with this statement is clearly authoritarian as they support more power and oversight of a particular activity by individuals. In the US, the right would tend to disagree with such a statement and there would be greater support amongst the left. By biasing the nature of the questions, Altemeyer sets up the questionaire to reaffirm his own suspicions. It is also interesting to note, that the scale has a minimal score of 20 and a high of 180. The average response for adults of older generations in the US is a 90...not very high on the scale. You seem to miss the point in trying to get me to take my argument somewhere else. Its not that liberals are insane. Quite frankly I think any suggestion that half the population is "insane" to be both insulting and incredibly arrogant. Labeling the side you disagree with as "insane" is a classic propganda technique, no different than those used in war-time posters. The issue is, does Altemery bias his questionaire with loaded questions intended to achieve specific results. The answer is undoubtly yes.

Have you ever taken or seen the questions in Altemeyer's survey? They are inherently biased and slanted in a way as to portray any traditionally Left-wing cause as rebellious/free-thinking and any right-wing cause as authoritarian. The questions are also inherently of a moral/religious nature with overemphasis on traditional family values. Altemeyer's survey is set up to confirm the starting assumptions he has made regarding "right-wing authoritarians". If the questions were altered so as to present "authoritarianism" on the side of Left-wing values and right-wing values as non-comformist, one could easily slant the results as to portray the political Left as "authoritarian". The subjective wording of the questions introduces bias by Altemeyer and other researchers using his scale.

1) I did point out the specific measures. Look at the tables that includes data from the studies used in the meta-analysis. In the second column they typically indicate the measure used. This varies widely from F-scale to C-scale to RWA to even voting records. 2) This is a common misconception. Statistical significance means that some test had a p-value small enough to pass some threshold of being signficant...i.e. having a low probability of occuring by random chance. However, p-values do not tell you what the effect of something is. The ""effect size" references how large the effect was. I can hit a nail with a small amount of force that drives it in 1/8th of an inch or I could hit it with a large amount of force that drives it all the way in. Both amounts of force can have a consistent and statistically significant effect even if their actual effect size is quite different. If something is only weakly correlated with something else, then there may be a significant correlation, but the effect is going to be smaller than something that is perfectly correlated. Effect size is very important in all kinds of things, like drug studies. A new drug may have a statistically significan effect, but if its effect is only very tiny, then it may still never make it to market because there are more effective drugs out there. 3) I am referering to the specific meta-study originally linked to. They and the subsequent media releases equivocate Altemeyer's "right-wing authoritarianism" with right-wing politics. 4) So? That's irrelevant to my point. I'm not saying that economics is the only aspect of political conservatism, I'm saying that as a major aspect of political conservatism, a failure to find a correlation of the traits in question with this important political ideology throws into question whether or not their study actually political conservatism or whether they are in fact conflating another measure/attribute and thus guilty of the fallacy of equivocation. If what their study has found actually has significant bearing on explaining political conservatism, then measures like fear of death should be reflected in major politically conservative (in the US and UK, not other nations) positions like economic conservatism. A common problem in any study that evaluates multiple variables is the problem of multiple testing. If you run 20 tests and have a cut-off p-value of say 0.05, then by chance alone you will have at least one test show a statistically significant association. In meta studies, the inability to control for all the variance between the studies included make this problem much worse. In evaluating the study then, we should be asking whether or not the data actually explains or at least correlates with major and important characteristics of the phenomena in question and if it does not, then this begs the question of how valid the results are. A lot of the data in the study comes from Sweden, for instance, which has a very different political history and tradition than the US or the UK. There have been other studies that used Altemeyer's scales in Eastern Europe and found Left-wing Authoritarianism as a factor of the those nations very different political histories and traditions. I have a fundamental problem that looks at the issue of "political conservatism" conflating different measures based on an assumption of the Western European/North American world. It makes assumptions about human behavior and politics that are rooted in a narrowized political history. Its exactly the same issue that pervades all of psychology in having primarily studied WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democrat) college students. We assume that this is the norm and base our research on this failing to account for the vast diversity of humanity and history. Even in the meta study in question, many of the studies included looked at WEIRD college students.

1) Meta study conflates multiple measures (F-scale, C-scale, voting records, RWA) that do not measure the same thing and are known not to measure the same thing. 2) Many effect sizes, even if statistically significant, are small. 3) Politics is conflated with authoritarianism even when the two contradict each other. 4) Important aspects associated with the "right" or "conservatism" in nations like the US or the UK fail to show any association. Namely economics, which in the US is central to the political right.

Genetic differences. Just because we can match sequence from two different species does not mean they are identical.

Hi, still fairly new to the forums. I am a geneticist with interests in genetics, evolution, molecular biology, plant biology, and agriculture. Spent 8 years in the National Guard as a combat engineer and served in Afghanistan. To a lesser extent I have interests in conservation, ecology, literature, international politics, the military, and history.