alchemist
2yr ago
Sorry, didn't check your Twitter, as I'm not on it, and don't like it (and don't like following links just to know what someone's talking about; I do like them for references).
I think it would be best to read what people are saying before responding to them.
Write it here, clearly, and I will. Don't send me to Twitter, or your blog (or do, but realize you've lost much of your audience). Reading this, I think you would be better off if you spent less time on Twitter (well, I think that goes for just about everyone...)
I guess if you stated clearly what you think contributes to IQ scores then perhaps we'd mostly agree. [...] What I read from your initial post is that effort was more important than everything else, which seemed clearly wrong. You gave this impression by not specifying how much effect you thought that it had, and by saying people claiming it didn't have an effect "obviously massively contradicts common sense," which is a very strong formulation.
Sorry, the point about how it "obviously massively contradicts common sense" was not meant to be interpreted as a measure of effect size, it was meant to be interpreted literally: as an expression that if I went out and told people that IQ tests don't depend on effort (as HBDers wpuld have me do), then people would conclude that I am delusionally worshipping IQ tests - and as I showed in the thread, it appears that they wpuld be right to conclude that.
I don't think people would conclude that, and I don't think you proved that in this thread. You remind me of the XKCD about using language in a very non-standard way and then feeling clever that they didn't understand you.
I don't really agree that effort is particularly nebulous of a concept. Have you never had the experience of just quickly marking down your first thoughts without wanting to bother thinking them through and not double-checking that they are right?
I get the concept of effort, but I think it's difficult to turn into something where you can say you're giving 20%, 50% 80% effort. But it's a minor point.
I feel like you're not listening to me, and I assume you're feeling the same about me. I think we've both reached our limits of what we think we can convey to the other. I wish you luck and success in better understanding g, IQ tests, HBD, and conservatives in general. My final two requests: work on writing more clearly, and listen more with the intent of understanding, rather than proving why you're right. (I will try to do the same!)
alchemist
2yr ago
So now I'm feeling smug for seeing the first poorly written paragraph and then the monstrous wall of text and then skipping the post entirely.
Life is too short for shittily written monster posts.
Make your point clearly, and succinctly, meeting your readers where they are, and not clothing it in unnecessarily verbosity in an attempt to sound learned.
Or don't, but I'm not going to bother reading it otherwise, nor will most others.
[I know it's not your post, but I'm tired of poorly written posts]
alchemist
2yr ago
"Just about all sex difference correlate with gender equality"
I don't think that's close to right -- it's much too strong, but I admit I haven't seen a lot of data. What I have seen is consistent differences across multiple cultures:
Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests
The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality
Note that the differences tend to be actually larger than many of these suggest at first glance, as there tend to multiple, at-least-partially-independent, so if you take multiple traits at once, the means move further apart.
Scott also has a great discussion on it in Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences
alchemist
2yr ago
No, model 1 isn't "debunked" and shouting "phenotypic null hypothesis" isn't the argument winner you seem to think it is.
alchemist
2yr ago
Yes, that men and women have different personalities and interests is one of the largest and most replicated results in psychology. I realize this is somewhat discouraged knowledge, but it's not too hard to find, e.g.:
Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests
The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality
Note that the differences tend to be actually larger than many of these suggest at first glance, as there tend to multiple, at-least-partially-independent, so if you take multiple traits at once, the means move further apart.
Scott also has a great discussion on it in Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences
I also think the 'greater variability hypothesis', namely that men tend to have greater variability in most traits, is both true, and explains a lot of the differences we see (more homeless men, more Nobel prize winners), because it means many more men at the extremes.
If you look at top scores in the math SATs, for example (over 750?) you see many more men than women. Sorry, I don't have a source easily on hand for this one, but I've verified it a few times, and welcome you to do so. (Women tend to outscore on the verbal, and their scores tend to be more correlated, which has implications for chosen careers.)
alchemist
2yr ago
Wow, thanks for sharing. I would love to see you post it on the Reddit adoration thread in /r/programming!
alchemist
2yr ago
No, it's still fairly good advice. If you watch, e.g. the Hacking Google series on YouTube, you'll see the start of the initial Chinese Aurora hack was in fact getting people to click on random links.
The basic idea is that due to weaknesses on some sites (I think XSS -- cross-site scripting is the term) or in other places, you get the people to execute code authenticated as themselves, which sometimes lets you do bad things.
(I am not a front-end person, or a security person, I just have had to follow some of the guidelines and tried to understand why).
Sorry, didn't check your Twitter, as I'm not on it, and don't like it (and don't like following links just to know what someone's talking about; I do like them for references).
I guess if you stated clearly what you think contributes to IQ scores then perhaps we'd mostly agree. As I think you say, accounting for 8% variance would be not too far from noise. That still seems quite a bit too high to me, and I don't really see how you clearly quantify 'effort' but would think to myself -- "whatever, if you want to believe that, go ahead it doesn't seem wrong enough to be worth fighting over". What I read from your initial post is that effort was more important than everything else, which seemed clearly wrong. You gave this impression by not specifying how much effect you thought that it had, and by saying people claiming it didn't have an effect "obviously massively contradicts common sense," which is a very strong formulation.
FWIW, I expect a very asymptotic-type curve, that rises extremely sharply from [answered questions at random without reading them] to [did test pretty normally], and then is pretty flat. It's like (but not quite as extreme) saying the kind of pen you use matters, because if yours is broken, or breaks half-way through, you'll get a lower score. So effort is not very interesting. But sure somehow accounting for 4% of the variance is plausible (sorry, to me 8% really seems too high, I'd think how well I slept, the questions I got, my mood, time of day, my pencil, and a bunch of other things would play a larger role than nebulous 'effort'). You seemed to be implying that means IQ tests are meaningless (and apologies if I misread it, again, please stately plainly your point so that doesn't happen as often), which that doesn't seem like a strong argument for. If that's not what you're implying, what is your point in bringing up effort?
alchemist
2yr ago
So, first off, thank you for posting, and apologies in advance if the criticism I'll give comes across as too harsh. You seem to be trying to get more seen and read, so I'm going to try to help.
First -- your writing style doesn't work well for me. It's too abstract, and you don't clearly state your point. For example, your point #1 "Heritability simply does not mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean - because of the phenotypic null hypothesis." What is your point here? What do you think "HBDs want it to mean"? What is the "phenotypic null hypothesis"? It's not good writing to make me chase down you thoughts, especially on other sites, especially before you've proven you're worth the work. I went to that site, and am not much more enlightened. You seem to somewhere make the point "Things influenced by genes often go though non-biological channels". Or maybe "things that look inherited aren't always". Sure, I'd say both are fairly non-controversial. A classic example of the second is, e.g. "speaking French" which looks inherited on the surface, but is clearly not biological. And yes, our environment and society mediate all kinds of things, we live in a complex interconnected world.
Do you have more of a point? I couldn't really tell (of course, that can be on me, but ... I've read and understood a fair number of others on this topic, but not your writing...) I really don't know what your code and diagrams at the end are supposed to show. Summarize your cool conclusion! E.g. "Even though X is not directly responsible, in a naive analysis it looks like it is, exactly like QQQ, which actually is directly responsible. Here's how that can play out ...". I think you're saying something like that, but you don't bother actually saying it (or I missed it).
In any case you sort of seem to be saying "we can't figure anything out" which both seems wrong, and kind of useless. Do you apply this to all such studies? Maybe we should -- I admit, I tend to write off almost of all psychological and sociological studies these days, because they seem so ideologically captured. On the other hand, between statistics, twin studies (and separated twin studies), and sibling studies, we seem to be able to do a pretty good job on some things.
Second -- you seem to be coming at this from a place of significant bias. "Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes," is an incredibly weak straw-man, it's basically "Everyone I disagree with is a racist". Is that really the best you can do, in terms of extending charity to the people you disagree with? I personally, like most of the others here, see the acknowledgement of group differences (and for what it's worth, I don't really care much if it's culture or biology, and both seem taboo anyway) as primarily an alternative for differing outcomes, without discrimination being the ONLY explanation.
I'm in tech. There aren't many women, nor many black people. This is ascribed to sexism and racism, which doesn't match what I've seen, experienced, or heard from the affected people (from women at least; I haven't asked many black colleagues about racism). I see my company following policy to massively privilege both groups, and to blame white cis-men for all the problems, and those both seem wrong, and even damaging to me (and to a number of people in the targeted groups, e.g. women who just want to be SWEs, and not feel they got their role because of their sex, and no, I'm not concern trolling, the suspicion around the privileging is real). I see differing interests (and maybe ability at the margins) and degrees as the main reasons for the differing representation, but we're not allowed to notice that, as "It's not the pipeline". James Damore got fired for trying to make this point.
You also see this censorship of blasphemy in the US, especially around crime, where apparently pointing out some choice statistics around violent crime is considered a hate crime. (Again, FWIW, I'd consider those stats more a cultural issue, but it's a pretty important one, upstream of the 'getting shot by police' issue).
So anyway, what I'd like from you, and I think would benefit you, is to tighten up your writing -- make your point first, then provide an explanation of it (it's a classic academic / systemic thinker error to do it the other way around). Make things more concrete. Work from a specific example and tie your points back to it. People are reluctant to trust generic models, as they are often used to lie (see Abigail Thompson's dissection of Hong-Page's "mathematical proof that diversity trumps ability". There's a nice discussion of it here
Also, try to be more charitable to your outgroup.
Also, as per the community rules, "don't attempt to build consensus", as you do when you write "... which claimed to find that effort does not matter for IQ scores. This obviously massively contradicts common sense,"
No, this doesn't "obviously massively contradict" my common sense, and I think many would disagree. In fact, I thought one of the main points of IQ tests, rather than "effort tests", is that neither effort nor prep makes much of a difference to them. Otherwise, for example, they wouldn't stay very stable over time (which I understand they do). Prep courses would also have more value, which I don't think do. Do you think when people can't make intellectual leaps others do, they just aren't trying hard enough in that particular moment? I think most would agree effort plays some role -- if I don't care or try at all on an IQ tests, and answer at random, I'll have a low score. If I try to be fast and disciplined, and use all my test-taking savvy, I'll probably (?) do better than if I just breeze through (although I wonder). But basically, once you're trying to do well, it's not really clear what "trying harder" even means on IQ test. It's not like pushing on a bar (and honestly, even for that the range where trying, vs training and genes and drugs, makes a difference, is pretty small in that moment. If I can barely do one pull-up, trying really hard might mean I do one, or two, but I'm generally not going to be able to do 10). So anyway, stop claiming consensus on things people will disagree on (especially things where your "consensus" seems to go against standard definitions).
I can't really comment on your main article, because I don't understand it beyond "assigning causation back to genes is tricky", which, I agree with, but, if that is your point, isn't a very exciting one, nor is the the pwn you seem to think it is. But if you have a different point, please state it clearly and simply, with a concrete example, and I'll try to address it.
It is so tiring. And then combined with people saying things like "women dominated early programming and computer science". Agh. I'm sure there were a number of important and talented women in computer science. I'm also pretty sure, from what I know of history, interests by sex, and the breakdown by sex over the 30 years I've been in the field, that it's pretty likely there were more men than women. (Yes, I know much of the original 'programming' work, which was like connecting cables in a telephone switchboard was mainly done by women, as were many of the clerical calculations. That's something different).
The Lovelace one is particularly annoying, since it appears both Babbage and someone else had made algorithms (a word from Arabic from waaay back) before her. But sure, all of the credit is hers, and men have just been stealing the idea from her.
Grace Hopper seems to have been pretty kick-ass. Ada Lovelace too. We don't need to make up shit so that they are even more kick-ass. It's deceptive and sad.
alchemist
2yr ago
For what it's worth, I feel like I'm drowning in woke, but mainly due to my American FAANG company. And I grew up quite left wing (I walked a strike line with my parents when I was child, I went canvassing with them for the NDP). I still consider myself liberal, and believe a social safety net is a good thing (while still be a fan of regulated capitalism). I did grow up fairly poor, which has shaped my attitudes to some degree (e.g. made me a fan of meritocracy).
I'm doing pretty well, but I was lucky and am fairly old. I worry for my sons, and the madness and reality-denying of the Identarians really does set me off. They so often seem to do the opposite of what they preach. And I do see real unfairness at my work.
alchemist
2yr ago
What kid would ever say "you can call me by my name"? That's just miles from how kids speak (in my experience).
alchemist
2yr ago
Hey, I'm sorry you went through that.
We managed to be friends with both rabid vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, but it wasn't always easy. I even (gasp) played volleyball with some unvaccinated. They were fairly young and healthy, I was vaccinated and healthy. I don't share your anger at the mask mandates, but I see where it comes from after hearing how your own family treated you (especially given you'd had it, which was generally thought to be better than a vaccination, I thought).
I think something about the fear of death, and maybe plagues, triggered something deeply primal in a lot of people ("broke their brains") and we got a lot of extremism out of something that was comparatively mild (especially once a vaccine was available).
alchemist
2yr ago
Thank you for doing the legwork (I'm assuming you did :D, too lazy to verify).
Didn't Mark Twain say something like "It's not the things you don't know that get you, it's the things you know and are wrong"?
alchemist
2yr ago
You might enjoy Câlisse moi là from Lisa LeBlanc.
I do, even though I don't understand more than about 1/3 of what she sings.
alchemist
2yr ago
Sorry, wasn't meant to be cryptic, but it wasn't as easy to find again as I expected. I was referring to Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who is/was a highly decorated (eight honorary law degrees) and celebrated maybe-first-nations judge.
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/mary-ellen-turpel-lafond-indigenous-cree-claims
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/15/world/canada/canada-indigenous-identity-pretendians.html
although I may have been blending it with Carrie Bourassa, who seems to also have faked her way into a senior post (also from Saskatchewan)
https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/carrie-bourassa-allegedly-faked-her-indigenous-identity.html
alchemist
2yr ago
Our company keeps hiring DEI folks, and it worries me -- they seem a net negative, beyond just their salary.
My first thought was that I agree with you. The second thought was that you can have a confidence in your confidence. My third thought was that that should baked into your primal estimation, and that if you're saying 80% +/- 20%, you're really saying something like 70%. Does it really make sense to be saying, hey, there's a chance I'm 99% sure, but it's only 10%??
These things really only make sense with repeated results anyway. A single event happens or it doesn't.
If you felt a real need to give more details on your prediction, I think it would be more interesting to give buckets, e.g. I expect the housing market to
5%: shrink > 15%
30%: shrink 5 - 15%
60%: stay flat, changing [-5, +5]
12%: grow 5 - 15%
3% grow > 15%
OTOH, thinking about this more (which makes me think that someone smarter and with more statistics has thought more about this), this still doesn't capture the idea of confidence. What if I don't know what a house is, and you ask me this? Can I really make any meaningful statement? I think I could say 50/50 grows or shrinks, or 90% doesn't change more than 95% (because few things do), but it's hard to capture what it means to have little certainty.
alchemist
2yr ago
Ha, I was just thinking the same thing! I'd love to only be done 10%. I'm around 25%; it has moved retirement dates out somewhat.
alchemist
2yr ago
I think you're missing the sweet grift factor. By doing this, you can get rewarded quite a bit, moreso than if you weren't special status.
Recently the "first 'first Nations' provincial Supreme Court Justice in Canada (for Saskatchewan) was revealed to be 'trans-racial'".
Canada has a bunch of juicy jobs only available to particular minorities. Get rid of those, or introduce mandatory DNA tests.
alchemist
2yr ago
I'm reminded of Bill Burr on Lance Armstrong: "Our 'roided up asshole beat your 'roided up asshole!"
alchemist
2yr ago
Well, I'll just say I missed that entirely. I'm not sure if that's Poe's law, or something else (my own shortcoming? forsooth!)
alchemist
2yr ago
Indonesian has that, and I always thought it was a super-useful concept.
Ha, you are not wrong! I tend to skip the multi-page treatises fairly aggressively. Perhaps that says something about my attention span (my last non-fiction book, The Secret of our Success, which despite being quite good, took me forever to finish!), but I'll just accept that. I think it says more about my patience and valuation of time though (which is a fine, but real, difference, IMO).
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