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LETTERS.
Frankly Awful
To the editor,
This letter concerns the article written by Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai titled "Reverse Discrimination by the Numbers," appearing in your summer 2000 issue.
I must express my disappointment in the level of scholarship found in that article. I think that the authors are probably correct in the conclusions that are drawn from the data, however, the representation of science and statistics is simply not professional. Speaking as someone who has taught graduate methods and statistics for 15 years and edited books and a journal dealing with these issues, the representations were frankly awful.
I will mention four of the more serious errors in the text. The problem is that all the errors cast a very negative reflection on the quality of scholarship and call now into question the accuracy and confidence anyone can have in the analysis.
First, the mathematical representations about causality are exceedingly strange (pages 74 and 81) and simply incorrect. The idea that a "large correlation" indicates a less ordered or causal system as opposed to a "small" correlation is incorrect. Take the following model, which indicates a "spurious" relationship between A and B.
There is a correlation between A and B, but the correlation is not causal because actually A and B are correlated because they are caused by a common underlying event X. Basically, X causes A and B to occur, but if you measured only A and B you would find a correlation existing between A and B but neither variable would cause the other.
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