> Both twins have an adopted brother whose name is Larry.
I mean I don't see any plausible way this could be genetic. A child doesn't have any meaningful level of control over who their parents choose to adopt or what they name them.
Yeah - and I think that's the problem with those lists. Are we supposed to believe that the adopted-brother name thing is genetic? Or are we just to say "oh, hah, what a coincidence". And if it's the latter, are we supposed to react that way to ALL the items on the list? If so, why is it in behaviour genetics textbooks...?
Linda was a super common name, especially, anecdotally, in the Midwest. (Though that is a name that just went “poof” in terms of popularity, rapidly, after that.) And as for both having sons named James? Pretty darn likely!
Dec 5, 2022·edited Jul 31, 2023Liked by Stuart Ritchie
It is a Ripley's Believe It Or Not item. If you look long and far enough you will find stories like that.
Re. the twins cheating or not, no doubt it helped that they are good looking. Jury's tend to believe good-looking people more often than ordinary or ugly looking people.
But, from what I read the school could not proof beyond doubt that the Kayla and Kellie were indeed cheating, yet still accused them. It cost the girls, hence the lawsuit and the trial. The twins could not continue their medical education, so they switched to studying law, got degrees, and are now working at the same law firm. All is well that ends well ?
Antoinette, it's a civil lawsuit, where the standard is the propensity of the evidence—if you can show you're more than 50% correct (50.1% will do it), you win. But even in criminal law, the standard is not “proof beyond doubt”—it's proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
I left the "reasonable" out because it was not a criminal trial but a lawsuit. Apparently "beyond doubt" is confusing for some. If you are potentially ruining lives there should be no doubt at all about the issue.
I was wondering if you'd cover this! I hope you had a nice honeymoon. The other complicating factor here is how the twins studying together for the duration of their training program would influence their exam answers. You'd expect two people who've studied intensively together to pick the same wrong answers more frequently than two students who studied independently. (Make those two students identical twins on top of that and I assume their propensity to get tripped up by the same wrong answers is a little higher.)
I don't actually know how much of the training program they did together, but I don't hear anyone considering it as a factor. I see it from time to time (e.g., a group of students who studied together tending to misunderstand operant conditioning terms the same way).
I'm reading the university's appeal now. There was a lot of other evidence against the twins besides the expert testimony. Now I kinda want to see the trial transcript.
Yeah - I feel like I must be missing something big on the side of the twins to convince the jury. Or maybe they really were sticklers for "proved beyond reasonable doubt".
It's very confusing; I'm not even sure why the judge let Segal testify at this point. The jury wasn't meant to adjudicate the cheating directly, and the judge should have made that clear. For defamation in the US, the burden was on the twins to prove the university lied based on a "preponderance of the evidence." All MUSC had to do was show they followed their own academic integrity procedures. (And if MUSC hadn't followed procedures, I suspect the twins could have sued over something easier to prove than defamation.)
The judge wasn't supposed to let it go to trial without some evidence the university's statements were false, so I'd bet the university wins on appeal. Judges in SC are elected if you can believe it. It's not unheard of for a trial judge to have more political connections than competence.
State and county judges are elected in Florida as well. What you said was right on the money, though a bit understated, regarding the competence of judges. The problem is that in elections, few people know anything about the judges, so they simply default to retain the judge in almost every case. In the recent election, every judge on my ballot and there were 8 or 9) was retained -- they don't run against anyone in they're incumbents. But even if people skipped the questions they have no knowledge of, as they should, it wouldn't take sophisticated political machinery to turn out enough votes for a candidate.
TL;DR: Electing judges, and turning them into favor-owing politicians, is a very poor idea.
Even if identical twins were actually completely identical individuals, I still wouldn't expect the same person doing the same test on different days to write the same answer to 96% of the questions.
Segal is a very serious scholar. I read her book about the twin studies from cover to cover. I am afraid supporting the defense in this case is an embarrassment for her.
I am not a scientist. However, the twins defense, like the twinkie defense, are both efforts to appeal to emotion as a effort to excuse in one case potentially inappropriate and in the other unlawful behavior. In the twins case, it seems to me that the University has at least reasonable grounds to question the outcome of the test. A simpler (and no doubt less costly approach) would be for the twins to retest in separate rooms with a new set of questions. If they pass all is good. If their answers right and wrong show the same correlation as when they test sitting beside each other, perhaps there is something worthy of further scientific study. I also realize that this practical approach does not comport with the litigious orientation of the US. It strikes me that there is little science in the defense (mostly speculation and bad math) and alot of lawyering.
Dividing the exponents is not the way you divide numbers, but dividing the final probability by the simlilarity score is certainly not what you should do either (regardless of the precise meaning of the similarity), so it seems statisticians are not missing from twin leagl team only....
It's impossible to know for certain how to do those things, but you can make sensible guess: for once, 10^38 is huge, so it's obviously the product of 1/chance of similarity for each answer, assuming chance of identical answer is un-(or very slightly)-correlated between questions. Very likely wrong, and also very likely what was done (because it's what is done in almost all such analyses.
10^-38 is the chance of the final result if each answer was similar by chance only, and is product_i P_similar_i, or P_similar ^nquestion if the probability of similar answer is the same for all questions. How many question, not sure, but assuming twin similarity score in answering questions (TS) is something like P_twin(identical answer)/P_nontwin(identical answer), and that this is the same for all questions (yeah...doubtful, and, again, what is always assumed for such analysis), probability for twin to cheat is P_similar ^nquestion*(TS)^nquestion=(p_similar*TS)^nquestion.
So yeah, neither formula were correct and there is no simple combination that gives you the answer without at least knowing how many suestion there was, but it's possible the probability of no cheat can go up very significantly
WRT Laplace's Demon, Popper (and Born and some others) wrote some interesting stuff around indeterminism in classical physics. I read some of it at a time that i was also studying QM in grad school, and it made sense at the time. YMMV. That was also at a time before they (or I) knew anything about chaos theory, as far as I know, but glancing at the papers, it seems like they were going in that direction. Which reminds me .... as someone who has made a career out of software development, the details of how Lorenz discovered the latter are pretty interesting, and also sort of comically trivial.
I'm actually of the opinion that it is likely that our brains are too puny to do anything but approximate reality, but that is going to go in a quasi-religious direction if i expand on it much. Plus, mom needs a walk.
> But to be honest, some of the others are such incredible levels of coincidence that they would still be surprising if the twins were 100% genetically identical and had been raised in the same home from birth and hadn’t been allowed to do anything without the other twin being present and had been subject to a fairly authoritarian parenting regime that instilled values about what names you should choose in a partner and for your dog.
Not really. Marrying two women who happen to have the same name? Well, that'd be weird if those women had really weird names. But they have very common names for their age cohort. It's like declaring it "weird" that my sister is named Jennifer and there was another Jennifer on our block growing up.
The same goes for having sons with the same first and middle names. Name choices aren't done in a vacuum, they're cultural. If the two boys were born around the same time, to parents who were about the same age (exactly the same age, when it comes to their fathers) then it's not that surprising that they have the same name. There must be hundreds or thousands of boys born within the same decade or two who have that exact same first and middle combo.
And the same goes *again* for the pet dog named Toy. Dogs are popular pets. Their names, like human names, follow trends. If they're both small breed dogs, it's hardly surprising that both sets of owners would pick a "small dog" name like "Toy".
Moving past the sociology of name choices, that leaves us with - choosing to vacation in Florida, a popular vacation spot (and how popular is the particular part of Florida that they vacation in?) and some vocational training at school and sheriff training afterwards. Now, those last two might actually be surprising - but are they?
Honestly, there's less than a dozen items on that list. How many random coincidences do any two people *normally* have in common? I have no idea, but I bet it's at least a dozen.
I do note the thing about cherry-picking from a longer list. But... it's not just that their wives have the same name! It's that their wives both had the same name, then they got divorced, and got married again to women with the same name.
In any case, this is just all about the mathematics/probability of coincidence: the bigger point is that I don't see what this has to do with genetics, which is of course the only reason any of these coincidences are being brought up in the first place.
The way the defense team divided exponents in half is beyond the pale. If the attorneys may have understood simple pre-algebra, but gambled that no one else in the SC courtroom would figure it out. If so, they were right. More likely, everyone in the courtroom was clueless.
Given that the twins had a history of close scores on tests *sometimes*, which logically might raise the specter of cheating, don't you think it would have been wise of two very smart people to have sat on opposite sides of the room for the proctored exam?
But hey, they made it all the way through law school, and presumably passed the SC bar, so what can I say?
> Both twins have an adopted brother whose name is Larry.
I mean I don't see any plausible way this could be genetic. A child doesn't have any meaningful level of control over who their parents choose to adopt or what they name them.
Yeah - and I think that's the problem with those lists. Are we supposed to believe that the adopted-brother name thing is genetic? Or are we just to say "oh, hah, what a coincidence". And if it's the latter, are we supposed to react that way to ALL the items on the list? If so, why is it in behaviour genetics textbooks...?
And on the name front…oh wow, this study was in 1979. The twins were 39. My dad got married around that time…to Linda! Just like these guys!
Which is…pretty darn likely!
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1950s.html
Linda was a super common name, especially, anecdotally, in the Midwest. (Though that is a name that just went “poof” in terms of popularity, rapidly, after that.) And as for both having sons named James? Pretty darn likely!
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1970s.html
It is a Ripley's Believe It Or Not item. If you look long and far enough you will find stories like that.
Re. the twins cheating or not, no doubt it helped that they are good looking. Jury's tend to believe good-looking people more often than ordinary or ugly looking people.
But, from what I read the school could not proof beyond doubt that the Kayla and Kellie were indeed cheating, yet still accused them. It cost the girls, hence the lawsuit and the trial. The twins could not continue their medical education, so they switched to studying law, got degrees, and are now working at the same law firm. All is well that ends well ?
Antoinette, it's a civil lawsuit, where the standard is the propensity of the evidence—if you can show you're more than 50% correct (50.1% will do it), you win. But even in criminal law, the standard is not “proof beyond doubt”—it's proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
I left the "reasonable" out because it was not a criminal trial but a lawsuit. Apparently "beyond doubt" is confusing for some. If you are potentially ruining lives there should be no doubt at all about the issue.
I was wondering if you'd cover this! I hope you had a nice honeymoon. The other complicating factor here is how the twins studying together for the duration of their training program would influence their exam answers. You'd expect two people who've studied intensively together to pick the same wrong answers more frequently than two students who studied independently. (Make those two students identical twins on top of that and I assume their propensity to get tripped up by the same wrong answers is a little higher.)
I don't actually know how much of the training program they did together, but I don't hear anyone considering it as a factor. I see it from time to time (e.g., a group of students who studied together tending to misunderstand operant conditioning terms the same way).
I'm reading the university's appeal now. There was a lot of other evidence against the twins besides the expert testimony. Now I kinda want to see the trial transcript.
Yeah - I feel like I must be missing something big on the side of the twins to convince the jury. Or maybe they really were sticklers for "proved beyond reasonable doubt".
It's very confusing; I'm not even sure why the judge let Segal testify at this point. The jury wasn't meant to adjudicate the cheating directly, and the judge should have made that clear. For defamation in the US, the burden was on the twins to prove the university lied based on a "preponderance of the evidence." All MUSC had to do was show they followed their own academic integrity procedures. (And if MUSC hadn't followed procedures, I suspect the twins could have sued over something easier to prove than defamation.)
The judge wasn't supposed to let it go to trial without some evidence the university's statements were false, so I'd bet the university wins on appeal. Judges in SC are elected if you can believe it. It's not unheard of for a trial judge to have more political connections than competence.
State and county judges are elected in Florida as well. What you said was right on the money, though a bit understated, regarding the competence of judges. The problem is that in elections, few people know anything about the judges, so they simply default to retain the judge in almost every case. In the recent election, every judge on my ballot and there were 8 or 9) was retained -- they don't run against anyone in they're incumbents. But even if people skipped the questions they have no knowledge of, as they should, it wouldn't take sophisticated political machinery to turn out enough votes for a candidate.
TL;DR: Electing judges, and turning them into favor-owing politicians, is a very poor idea.
Even if identical twins were actually completely identical individuals, I still wouldn't expect the same person doing the same test on different days to write the same answer to 96% of the questions.
Segal is a very serious scholar. I read her book about the twin studies from cover to cover. I am afraid supporting the defense in this case is an embarrassment for her.
Stuart, have you ever considered the coincidence that the home of the original twins study is itself twinned with St Paul?
I am not a scientist. However, the twins defense, like the twinkie defense, are both efforts to appeal to emotion as a effort to excuse in one case potentially inappropriate and in the other unlawful behavior. In the twins case, it seems to me that the University has at least reasonable grounds to question the outcome of the test. A simpler (and no doubt less costly approach) would be for the twins to retest in separate rooms with a new set of questions. If they pass all is good. If their answers right and wrong show the same correlation as when they test sitting beside each other, perhaps there is something worthy of further scientific study. I also realize that this practical approach does not comport with the litigious orientation of the US. It strikes me that there is little science in the defense (mostly speculation and bad math) and alot of lawyering.
Dividing the exponents is not the way you divide numbers, but dividing the final probability by the simlilarity score is certainly not what you should do either (regardless of the precise meaning of the similarity), so it seems statisticians are not missing from twin leagl team only....
It's impossible to know for certain how to do those things, but you can make sensible guess: for once, 10^38 is huge, so it's obviously the product of 1/chance of similarity for each answer, assuming chance of identical answer is un-(or very slightly)-correlated between questions. Very likely wrong, and also very likely what was done (because it's what is done in almost all such analyses.
10^-38 is the chance of the final result if each answer was similar by chance only, and is product_i P_similar_i, or P_similar ^nquestion if the probability of similar answer is the same for all questions. How many question, not sure, but assuming twin similarity score in answering questions (TS) is something like P_twin(identical answer)/P_nontwin(identical answer), and that this is the same for all questions (yeah...doubtful, and, again, what is always assumed for such analysis), probability for twin to cheat is P_similar ^nquestion*(TS)^nquestion=(p_similar*TS)^nquestion.
So yeah, neither formula were correct and there is no simple combination that gives you the answer without at least knowing how many suestion there was, but it's possible the probability of no cheat can go up very significantly
WRT Laplace's Demon, Popper (and Born and some others) wrote some interesting stuff around indeterminism in classical physics. I read some of it at a time that i was also studying QM in grad school, and it made sense at the time. YMMV. That was also at a time before they (or I) knew anything about chaos theory, as far as I know, but glancing at the papers, it seems like they were going in that direction. Which reminds me .... as someone who has made a career out of software development, the details of how Lorenz discovered the latter are pretty interesting, and also sort of comically trivial.
I'm actually of the opinion that it is likely that our brains are too puny to do anything but approximate reality, but that is going to go in a quasi-religious direction if i expand on it much. Plus, mom needs a walk.
Sam Harris offers an interesting perspective on free will as an illusion if anyone is interested: https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will
What about Celestial Twins: https://www.catastrophism.com/intro/search.cgi?zoom_query=%22celestial+twins&zoom_per_page=25&zoom_and=1&zoom_cat=-1 ?
By the way, conventional dating of the Earth and its contents and those beyond are all sci-fi too.
I make some corrections to those errors at https://cataclysmicearthhistory.substack.com/archive
And I correct some vaccine science errors at https://covidandvaxfaqs.substack.com/archive
Also, I post about Important Little-Known Info at https://ilki.substack.com/archive
as well as some interesting, if unimportant, stuff.
https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/macroscope/the-dangerous-resurgence-in-race-science
> But to be honest, some of the others are such incredible levels of coincidence that they would still be surprising if the twins were 100% genetically identical and had been raised in the same home from birth and hadn’t been allowed to do anything without the other twin being present and had been subject to a fairly authoritarian parenting regime that instilled values about what names you should choose in a partner and for your dog.
Not really. Marrying two women who happen to have the same name? Well, that'd be weird if those women had really weird names. But they have very common names for their age cohort. It's like declaring it "weird" that my sister is named Jennifer and there was another Jennifer on our block growing up.
The same goes for having sons with the same first and middle names. Name choices aren't done in a vacuum, they're cultural. If the two boys were born around the same time, to parents who were about the same age (exactly the same age, when it comes to their fathers) then it's not that surprising that they have the same name. There must be hundreds or thousands of boys born within the same decade or two who have that exact same first and middle combo.
And the same goes *again* for the pet dog named Toy. Dogs are popular pets. Their names, like human names, follow trends. If they're both small breed dogs, it's hardly surprising that both sets of owners would pick a "small dog" name like "Toy".
Moving past the sociology of name choices, that leaves us with - choosing to vacation in Florida, a popular vacation spot (and how popular is the particular part of Florida that they vacation in?) and some vocational training at school and sheriff training afterwards. Now, those last two might actually be surprising - but are they?
Honestly, there's less than a dozen items on that list. How many random coincidences do any two people *normally* have in common? I have no idea, but I bet it's at least a dozen.
I do note the thing about cherry-picking from a longer list. But... it's not just that their wives have the same name! It's that their wives both had the same name, then they got divorced, and got married again to women with the same name.
In any case, this is just all about the mathematics/probability of coincidence: the bigger point is that I don't see what this has to do with genetics, which is of course the only reason any of these coincidences are being brought up in the first place.
The way the defense team divided exponents in half is beyond the pale. If the attorneys may have understood simple pre-algebra, but gambled that no one else in the SC courtroom would figure it out. If so, they were right. More likely, everyone in the courtroom was clueless.
Given that the twins had a history of close scores on tests *sometimes*, which logically might raise the specter of cheating, don't you think it would have been wise of two very smart people to have sat on opposite sides of the room for the proctored exam?
But hey, they made it all the way through law school, and presumably passed the SC bar, so what can I say?