g, factor analysis

Cosma Shalizi's article (it is not a post) on g and factor analysis can be praised but it can not be praised enough. I particularly like the bit about factor analysis, being that I work at a consulting firm with a bunch of I/O Psychologists. When not doing regular data analysis they develop employment tests. I know little enough about this arcana other than the couple of statistical procedures I've found useful for my work, so I'm grateful for Cosma's explanation.

I have happily worked at a testing company for over six months without developing any opinions about g as a platonically really real thing. We try to stay away from g loaded tests because we're trying to create tests that discriminate as little as possible, and there are plenty of ways to predict job performance without g (though I gather it is a bit harder).

I can recall several different economics articles that use IQ scores as quick and dirty proxies for human capital, a practice which entails no commitment to any dangerous or mistaken views about human psychology. Which is not to say that most of economics is not shot through with mistaken views of human psychology, but most of these are made out of either laziness or a desire for tractability.

books

Grabbed from Heels.
Bold those you've read. Italicize books you have started but couldn't finish.Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.Underline those on your To Be Read list

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies*
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius*
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Quicksilver
Middlesex
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (Didn't Heels, Johnny Logic, Ticknart and I read this in the same class?)
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les MisÃrables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything*
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five*
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers


A few things strike me about this list. it's a little light on non-fiction. The only non-fiction I haven't read is The People's History of the United States, ans that's because I read Howard Zinn's history of the twentieth century and found it to be a complete waste of time.

I don't plan on ever finishing any of the italicised books. They fall into four categories:
1. Important Canonical Classics that I just found too boring to finish; Ulysses, The Illiad, A Tale of Two Cities, The Prince.
2. Things I just picked up and started reading with no intention of finishing; The Silmarillion.
3. Things that everyone else said were great and I just didn't get it; Beloved .
4. Clunky, overexpositional books written by Ayn Rand; Atlas Shrugged.

There should be another category, books that after you finish them you keep on the table for months so you can reread your favorite bits over and over again. A Short History of Nearly Everything and Guns, Germs and Steel would fall into this category for me. Yet another category should be books that grabbed such that you had to finish them in one sitting: Unbearable Lightness of Being and Catch-22.

I don't really have a formal reading list. I have, however, felt a vague obligation to give Jane Austin a try for some time. Other than that, my unread books just like ones I have any urgent need to go out and read.