The mythologization of regression towards the mean
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the quantitative methodology literature, there now exists what can be considered a received account of the enigmatic phenomenon known as regression towards the mean (RTM), the origins of which can be traced to the work of Sir Francis Galton circa 1885. On the received account, RTM is, variably, portrayed as a ubiquitous, unobservable property of individual-level difference and change phenomena, a force that impacts upon the characteristics of individual entities, an explanation for difference and change phenomena, and a profound threat to the drawing of correct conclusions in experiments. In the current paper, we describe the most essential components of the received account, and offer arguments to the effect that the received account is a mythologization of RTM. In particular, we: (a) describe the scientific and statistical setting in which a consideration of RTM is embedded; (b) translate Galton’s discussion of RTM into modern statistical terms; (c) excavate a definition of the concept regression towards the mean from Galton’s discussion of RTM; and (d) employ the excavated definition to dismantle certain of the most essential components of the received account.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it