tailcalled
2yr ago
What's wrong with "HBD proponents think heritable T is mraningful evidence for evopsych on T, even though it's not"?
tailcalled
2yr ago
Blank slatism is a strawman though. E.g. Turkheimer had this denouncement to say of blank slatists who argue against heritability:
It is not a given that both sides of every argument are being reasonable. In the final analysis, this book is not reasoning forward from a known set of facts, seeking their explanation; it is confabulating backwards from a fixed conclusion, eliding any segments of the evidence that don’t lead to the preordained destination. The Trouble With Twin Studies is science denial.
tailcalled
2yr ago
But human neural uniformity sounds like a dumb and baseless theory.
tailcalled
2yr ago
One productive step you could take if you want people to engage with the argument is to do the work of simplifying the argument to the point where it doesn't take significant investment to understand it. Boil it down to a couple of sentences with a simple toy model, and explain how it analogizes back to the original claim. But your whole method of repeatedly posting to the front page "here's a link to a paper from a confessed liar, go do a ton of homework to understand it if you want to consider yourself rational" is just one iteration of a gish gallop.
What's wrong with the toy model I gave in my article, of education? That genes affect intelligence which affect exam completion which affect education?
tailcalled
2yr ago
I don't need to attempt hard to make an argument if the issue is very straightforward. If P(B) is high then P(A|B) ~ P(A).
tailcalled
2yr ago
What about purging people like Turkheimer, who explicitly put their ideology above science? Are you giving them a pass, and instead prefer to focus on those who inappropriately address your methodological pet concern?
Look, to me, you seem to be more interested in purging people and silencing the discussion, instead of in using science to learn about reality and have these learning inform our behavior and policy.
I am interested in promoting people who can help me learn things and purging people who introduce noise and waste time.
It just so happens that there are a number of very general principles that must be taken into account, as they affect the results everywhere you go. HBD is one of them! For instance, racial differences in intelligence cause a whole bunch of racial inequality in outcomes, and if you don't realize that, there's going to be a comprehensive mysterious pattern, which might make you falsely infer something like "everything is racist". However, the phenotypic null hypothesis is another one! Phenotypic causality causes a whole bunch of heritability and genetic correlations, and if you don't realize that, there's going to be a comprehensive mysterious pattern, which might make you falsely infer some sort of genetic solipsism (especially in combination with measurement error, which suppresses environmental correlations).
If someone keeps spamming racial inequality studies and talking about structural racism, while being difficult to convince to even think of alternate hypotheses, then a healthy behavior genetics group should consider purging them and finding someone more productive to talk to. But if someone keeps spamming twin studies and talking about genetics, while being difficult to convince to even think of alternate hypotheses, then a healthy behavior genetics group should again purge them.
Why? Partly to avoid noise and waste, but also partly to align incentives to actually learning things, and so on.
You can’t even provide any example why your pet concern is relevant for me at all!
You're not interested in behavior genetics, you admit so yourself! Of course a key principle of behavior genetics is not going to be interesting to you.
tailcalled
2yr ago
I don't buy that his arguments have only a coincidental corration to truth. He is biased, yes, but there is also an important signal.
tailcalled
2yr ago
I have already read his point about the phenotypic null hypothesis, so your argument can't exactly persuade me to un-read it, whatever that would mean. And having read it, I've come to the conclusion that it's a critically important point for understanding heritability. Reading his paper and understanding his argument screens off whichever virtue or vice he might have.
tailcalled
2yr ago
I ask since it looks like we are taking the presumptive priors of environmentalism, slapping it with a 'null hypothesis' label and saying that it now beats out the presumptive priors of hereditarianism. I don't see how this changes anything. Other than framing the discussion in a way where your enemy is ignorant and hasn't considered something when in reality I am pretty sure most HBD'ers are pretty well acquainted with the environmentalist worldview.
It's the phenotypic null hypothesis, not the environmental null hypothesis.
To me, as an illiterate HBD'er, it just seems like skirting the actual issues. If you don't have an alternative theory of reality to human biology to supplant the HBD one then what is the point of this? Assert we can't know anything about anything and then what? This topic isn't worth discussing outside the context of two competing explanatory worldviews.
There are various things that can be done to reduce the problems. For instance in the case of homophobia and mental illness, you can look at environmentla correlations rather than looking at genetic correlations (though that requires good measurement).
However, before one can apply these solutions, one has to actually know what the problem is.
tailcalled
2yr ago
What does the biological null hypothesis say?
tailcalled
2yr ago
I don't think the phenotypic null hypothesis is directly applicable to racial differences because we have a lot of specific evidence on race and IQ that makes it not a general thing. Rather, it has effects on what sorts of arguments are relevant for race and IQ.
Also what evidence would raise your priors of a trait being genetic not merely heritable, other than finding the {X-gene} ?
Correlation with anatomy, especially directly relevant anatomy (IQ correlates with brain size).
Being consistently expressed regardless of context.
Having a clear evolutionary/theoretical reason to expect being biological.
tailcalled
2yr ago
What is "human neural uniformity"?
tailcalled
2yr ago
Dude, read a few twin studies, they find that pretty much everything is heritable, of course heritability is of no evidentiary value.
tailcalled
2yr ago
I'm much more interested in the science side of things than the policy side of things, so I don't really have any strong examples at hand. It's just that I think that obviously people who refuse to understand the phenotypic null hypothesis should be purged from discussions of behavior genetics, so if HBDers don't like getting purged from discussions they should make sure to understand it.
tailcalled
2yr ago
I'm not saying I'm disagreeing with the core HBD conclusion. I'm saying HBDers ought to have a sufficiently good understanding of the phenotypic null hypothesis that they roll their eyes at studies claiming to find evidence for evopsych by finding traits to be heritable.
tailcalled
2yr ago
I'm not talking about how things morally ought to be, I'm trying to figure out how the world is actually like. For the purpose of e.g. doing evolutionary psychology, such as with the linked study, it is relevant to know that heritability is of no evidentiary value.
I didn't interpret Turkheimer as judging it ugly rather than true on moral grounds, I interpreted him as judging it ugly rather than silly or unobjectionable on moral grounds.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Particularly relevant to HBD, my understanding is that you might say that blacks scoring lower on tests might be shown to be heritable, but perhaps that could be because of racism. Since blackness is also genetically heritable, if blackness were to cause them to experience racism which causes their test scores to be lower, then this would be a plausible explanation for why low test scores appear to be genetically heritable in blacks, but it would actually be due to blackness being genetically inherited and that causing low test scores through a more indirect means than low intelligence.
Yes, that would be one potential example (though I don't expect this to be the true answer because it has been studied by e.g. looking for whether skin color is a mediator, though I'm currently trying to commission a different study which looks at it from a different angle).
However the phenotypic null hypothesis of course applies to tons and tons of behavior genetics, not just within race stuff but also lots of other places. And HBDers often discuss other behavior genetic studies without properly appreciating the phenotypic null hypothesis.
I think people are perhaps responding to you defensively because this feels like an isolated demand for rigor or weakmanning directed specifically at HBD, without considering the epistemic failings of hardline blank-slatists which are surely even greater.
I mean I've definitely called out people on both sides for nonsense. I even tend to hang out in Turkheimer's mentions and critique him. So I don't think I'm doing isolated demands for rigor, I think I'm doing widespread demands for rigor.
Also I think that showing a trait to be heritable has to count as weak Bayesian evidence at least in favor of a genetic explanation.
The prior probability that a variable is heritable is really really high. Meanwhile, Bayesian updating depends on the probability of the evidence being low, as otherwise it doesn't change your priors much.
tailcalled
2yr ago
But if you're going to impose large costs on me and mine you need to have real receipts.
Actually you just need to have a sufficient majority of the voters or people in positions at power in the institutions that make decisions about what costs to bear in order to create equality. Most political decisions do not seem to be very informed by science.
tailcalled
2yr ago
As far as I know, twin and adoption studies consistently show that genetics matter much more than parenting in causing differences between people. So the HBD-aligned people are right about that part.
Of course "does genetics or parenting matter more for causing differences between people" is not the only nature-nurture question of interest, and behavior genetic methods might not be viable for other questions, or might require adjustments to the biometric numbers to be applicable.
tailcalled
2yr ago
I agree that either both CRT and HBD should be permissible to discuss, or neither should be, with the current situation being unjust against HBD. I used to lean towards "both", wanting the free market of ideas to sort it out. However, the free market of ideas doesn't seem to work, as evidenced by lots of things including HBDers not understanding the phenotypic null hypothesis, so now I don't know what to think anymore.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Reliance on the "phenotypical null hypothesis" is uninteresting
Is the goal to be interesting or to figure out the truth?
and really I find the name to be ridiculous as it is just simply asserting an unearned null hypothesis status
It's not unearned, it's a fundamental property of heritability that it transfers through phenotypic causality, and there's lots of phenotypic causality to go through.
It's the same kind of critique that the possibility that we're actual brains in a vat means I can't be certain about measurements during woodworking.
No, the phenotypic null hypothesis agrees that the measurements work, it just points out something about what they mean.
But you understand that this doesn't actually impact policy discussion right? I don't need proof against solipsism to accurately measure a cut of wood and I don't need a unified theory of genetic determinism to find out that the policy proposals of blank slatists fail in every conceivable way and we should stop listening to their batshit theories.
I understand that the phenotypic null hypothesis is not a knockdown argument against HBD, and that it is not meant to be. Instead it covers the validity of various types of arguments.
Like if HBDers keep using argument that are invalid due to the phenotypic null hypothesis, and they refuse to learn about the phenotypic null hypothesis, then surely critics of HBD are in the right in dismissing HBDers as clueless about behavior genetics. You can't expect anti-HBDers to want to spend infinite time knocking down nonsense arguments. (Of course that point is symmetric - anti-HBDers also often come up with nonsense.)
Maybe there is some allergen with a simple intervention that will equalize all populations on average on IQ tests and achieve racial achievement equity and I'll celebrate that discovery more than you can image, but you don't get to call it a null hypothesis when literally no evidence has ever pointed to it being true.
The null hypothesis isn't about race differences in IQ, it's about within-population heritability in all sorts of things.
tailcalled
2yr ago
I appreciate you trying to bring nuance to the conversation, but without some examples it's still not clear to me what sorts of things you disagree with HBDers about exactly.
I gave an example? The linked study? It's absolutely absurd methodology for testing the stated research question.
I think the most relevant question is the extent to which the gaps in intellectual achievement, employment in various professions, and crime rates could realistically be changed by policy interventions.
There are many possible questions one can come up with, and this is one of them, but it's not the one I'm making the threads about.
I'm making the threads about the phenotypic null hypothesis, which is a critical question for how to interpret various other kinds of evidence like twin studies.
As far as I can tell, you're saying that heritable traits might be caused along the way by others treating people differently based on their phenotype, and if that differential treatment were to go away, the presumably so would the heritability. Is that a fair summary?
Yes that is part of it, for instance if you are smart due to genetics then people will give you more education credentials and more money, and if instead people gave everyone a random amount of money, the heritability of income would disappear.
However it doesn't technically speaking have to be others treatment. It might also be your own treatment, or a result of other things like disease or physics or lots of things. Basically, variables affect each other across different levels, and that prevents heritability from distinguishing biological from nonbiological levels.
And as an aside, I find the name "phenotypic null hypothesis" to be a bad name for two reasons: 1) It's not descriptive, and 2) it seems to be playing a rhetorical game by calling itself the "null hypothesis". I prefer to discuss evidence for and against various claims rather than arguing about who has the burden of proof.
I think it has a good reason to call itself the null hypothesis. It would be absurd to claim that the heritability of income or marriage was not due to the way other people treat you phenotypically. You can't have a serious debate about HBD without the phenotypic null hypothesis being properly understood.
tailcalled
2yr ago
You did not respond to that allegation. Why should we waste time sorting through the pilpul of a confessed propagandist if we are in any way interested in epistemics, as you purport to be?
I am not aware of any epistemic rules which say that you can't use moral judgements to decide whether something is silly or ugly.
Let me also cut through what feels like a lot of unnecessary argumentation and simply ask you this: how can you explain the correlation between cognitive skills and genetic closeness depicted in this figure without acknowledging substantial genetic heritability? How is any sort of null hypothesis even necessary with this kind of direct evidence in hand?
I agree that they are heritable. Turkheimer also agrees that they are heritable.
Language and kind of also religion would be an exception, yes.
But beyond those exceptions, and a few others, it seems to me that there are an enormous number of traits where heritability shows up. Already at vocabulary and religiosity do you see a ton of heritability. Pretty much all personality traits and all interests are heritable. Of course the classic HBD point is that abilities tend to be heritable and highly genetically correlated. Relationship to parents, peers and teachers is heritable, I believe. Having a dog in your mid-life is heritable. Etc.
The point is that pretty much everything is heritable, so the prior for heritability is extremely high, not that absolutely everything is heritable.
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