Mertz’s reply to Unz’s response to Mertz’s comments on Unz’s article

Here.

And here’s the story so far: Ron Unz posted a long article on college admissions of Asians and Jews with some numbers and comparisons that made their way into some blogs (including here) and also a David Brooks NYT column which was read by many people, including Janet Mertz, who’d done previous research on ethnic composition of high-end math students.

Mertz contacted me (she’d earlier tried Brooks and others but received no helpful reply), and I posted her findings along with those of another correspondent. Unz then replied, motivating Mertz to write a seven-page document expanding on her earlier emails. Unz responded to that (also here), characterizing Mertz as maybe “emotional” but not actually disputing any of her figures. Unz did, however, make the unconvincing (to me) implication that his original numbers were basically OK even in light of Mertz’s corrections. So Mertz responded once more. (There’s also a side discussion about women’s representation in mathematics, an interesting topic but one I’m ignoring here as not being relevant to the main point of discussion.)

Mertz’s latest seems reasonable to me. I particularly like this bit, which I think has more general application:

Unz considered “five minutes of cursory surname analysis” a sufficient basis on which to claim an important unexpected discovery, i.e., a rapid collapse in Jewish very high-end achievement in the 21st century. Most unexpected discoveries are found not to be true when additional analyses are performed to test their validity.

Exactly!

If I had put together a number based on a cursory five minute analysis, and if that number had appeared in the Times, and then someone went to the trouble of correcting me, I’d be on the phone with the newspaper right away asking them to issue a correction. I might disagree on the interpretation of the numbers, but I’d feel bad about putting a mistake into wide circulation, and I’d want to do whatever was necessary to correct it.

Again, to issue this correction would not necessarily require Unz to back off from all his larger conclusions; he’d just have to modify his claims in light of the data, which is a good idea in any case but especially true when confronted with much higher quality data than what you started with.

P.S. As before, the question might reasonably arise: why do I continue to post on this topic? For an answer to this question, I refer you to the last part of this earlier post, the part entitled, “A couple more things (for now).”