tailcalled
2yr ago
Wait is the study even by Plomin? The authors listed are:
Elham Assary, Helena M. S. Zavos, Eva Krapohl, Robert Keers & Michael Pluess
None of whom seem to be Plomin.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Ok, so regarding this paper:
Plomin practices what he preaches, too – here's an example of a paper.
According to Plomin, the goal of the paper is to test the plausibility of evolutionary theories are about environmental sensitivity by using twin studies to look for heritability:
According to the recent evolutionary-inspired theories (i.e., differential susceptibility [1], biological sensitivity to context [2]), humans, like many other species [3], differ substantially in their sensitivity to contextual factors, with some more susceptible to environmental influences than others. Importantly, these theories suggest that heightened sensitivity predicts both the reactivity to adverse contexts as well as the propensity to benefit from supportive features of positive environments. In other words, sensitivity is proposed to influence the impact of environmental influences in a “for better and for worse” manner [4]. These prominent theories converge on the proposition that genetic factors play a significant role in individual differences in Environmental Sensitivity (ES) [1, 2, 5].
This is very much the sort of nonsense the phenotypic null hypothesis is an objection to. Everything is heritable, and we have good theoretical understanding of why that is. It is thus of no evidentiary value to find that things are heritable, and this shouldn't be treated as a confirmation of evolutionary theories, which destroys the whole point of the paper.
For example, children who scored higher on the HSC scale were found to benefit significantly more than less sensitive children from schoolbased resilience [16]
Not so relevant to the phenotypic null hypothesis and I haven't looked at this in detail as it's a citation of a different study, but the cited study makes me suspicious: They didn't find any main effect of the treatment, so this was a subgroup analysis of exactly the sort that Scott Alexander has warned me about.
[common pathway model for HSC]
I acknowledge that common pathway models/factor models can control for some types of measurement error in some scenarios, but it doesn't really seem to work for personality traits (and therefore not for HSC either, unless HSC is an unusual personality trait). The appropriate way to do this for personality data is multi-informant data, which tends to lead to way higher heritabilities for personality, indicating that a substantial proportion of the nonshared environment component is measurement error, even with naive common pathways.
[correlation matrix for personality traits]
Plomin finds that all the "good" personality traits are correlated, i.e. emotional stability, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness are all positively correlated with each other. The model he chooses to apply to those correlations assumes that these correlations are substantive, but I believe that is an inappropriate model.
Correlations between the Big Five personality traits within a single rater appear to reflect a "Halo"/"social desirability" bias factor. The way we can tell this is because it fails to correlate across informants. I.e. while it's true that you rating yourself as more extraverted correlates with you rating yourself as more conscientious, you rating yourself as more extraverted does not correlate with others rating you as more conscientious. See for instance this paper.
Also I believe it's well-established that the different subscales of HSC differ from each other in their correlations with the Big Five, and indeed he replicates that finding in the study. However, this pattern of correlations is incompatible with the notion that the correlations between HSC subscales and Big Five is mediated by the HSC common pathway, which makes his later models very strange.
In conclusion, the Plomin study you linked is a fractal of bad study design. In many ways it's a good example of the necessity to further popularize the phenotypic null hypothesis. However, the study also has severe flaws beyond the phenotypic null hypothesis. This is cruxy to me: if you can convince me that Plomin's study is good, then I will likely grant that I was wrong about my point about the phenotypic null hypothesis, but conversely I think Plomin's study is really bad and I think Turkheimer has to deal with an endless stream of studies that are equally as bad as Plomin's here, so I think this serves as an excellent case study that explains why Turkheimer is so bothered by behavioral genetics.
I rest my case.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Plomin practices what he preaches, too – here's an example of a paper.
I don't have time to respond to this right now, as I'm on my phone, but just quickly skimming it, it looks cruxy to me. I will respond once I get home.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Ok, and?
….The problem you talk about in your Substack post is real, although not nearly as damaging with regards to the sort of HBD beliefs most salient in the culture war and pro/anti-HBD debate (i.e. not the issue of bullied gays) as one could assume from careless reading of your initial post.
I'm not claiming it to be damaging to HBD beliefs, I'm claiming it to be damaging to certain types of arguments and findings HBDers often make. There can be bad arguments for correct conclusions, and people who make those arguments should stop making them because it introduces noise and makes it harder to find the good arguments.
Again I posted various examples of people not properly applying the phenotypic null hypothesis. Let's zoom into one of them to understand the problem:
https://twitter.com/tailcalled/status/1475441032292667394
If one doesn't understand the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this is an exciting study. Researchers have shown jealousy and restricted sociosexuality to be genetic! And to be biologically linked to each other! In the past I would have been really interested in these sorts of results, as tying into all sorts of evo psych theories.
However, when appreciating the phenotypic null hypothesis, it's a boring study. What are we even supposed to learn from it? Obviously these variables are going to be heritable and genetically correlated, but this doesn't really tell us much.
If you disagree with this notion, then feel encouraged to make your case for why this is such an important and meaningful finding.
Turkheimer, like Lewontin before him with his «apportionment» and, more to the point, with his corn plants (cited by Ned Block here), is making a mountain out of a common-sensical molehill, in his case to bury the monster of HBD implications that have sprang forth (as he asserts, unreasonably) from his own First Law that he now seeks to reframe (as much is stated in the paper).
I don't think Turkheimer is being an obscurantist here. He's a leading behavior geneticist and an editor for a behavior genetics journal; he has to deal with an endless stream of papers that proudly talk about how they've shown this and that to be genetic. He's got excellent reasons to try to make people accept the phenotypic null hypothesis, since it's a huge piece of missing knowledge.
Measurement error is a fundamental problem; though as better-informed people remind us, there are methods, e.g. common pathway models, which help against it,
But these models are rarely used. Even from the "better-informed people", I have had trouble getting it for e.g. testing the causal effect of g.
It is also possible to directly test for AE vs ACE
This is badly powered when C is smallish, e.g. try computing the power requirement for C^2=0.01.
(Besides, we have plenty of data such as admixture and, as of late, GWAS confirming simple additive model for the group difference – qualitatively similar to the case of height, not similar to gay-bullying and personality research)
I don't see how GWAS additivity defends personality research, can you expand? In particular I don't see how phenotypic null hypothesis predicts nonadditivity.
tailcalled
2yr ago
If I had to hazard a guess, testosterone and estrogene are pretty good candidates for all of these effects and they are mediated primarily through biological factors.
That doesn't seem to explain names?
And gender identity and gender equality are very different things.
Brainfart, I meant gender equality.
tailcalled
2yr ago
What do you mean by "erronously"?
tailcalled
2yr ago
Do you sincerely believe that the sex differences in grip strength are to a meaningful degree affected by social attitudes towards gender equality?
No, but I saw other physical sex differences, I think it was waist-to-hip ratio, which correlated with gender identity. I don't know why they correlate, but y'know, generalized phenotypic null hypothesis. Whatever causes sex difference in WHR to increase could plausibly also cause sex differences in grip strength to increase.
tailcalled
2yr ago
It totally does fit as an example, one just has to be careful what it is an example of.
tailcalled
2yr ago
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.
Idk, I might be wrong, it's just the impression I've gotten from scrolling through twitter and seeing lots of random variables being linked to gender equality. Sex differences in waist-to-hip ratio, in values, strength of gender stereotypes (yes really, more gender-equal countries have stronger gender stereotypes), stuff like that. Maybe there are other variables where this pattern doesn't hold, but I would want to see the oddities explained before I grant this type of argument.
What I have seen is consistent differences across multiple cultures:
Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests
I would like to see more measurement invariance studies done of vocational interests. I downloaded a dataset of vocational interests from the Eugene-Springfield Community Sample, and the MI looked kind of problematic there. But I didn't really like ORVIS, and I didn't investigate the MI very thoroughly, so I'm not sure.
If sex differences in interests are not MI, then that raises questions about the reasonableness of summarizing them using variables that are supposed to be valid within the sexes too. In particular it may be indicative that the self-socialization hypothesis is true, because the self-socialization hypothesis proposes a different mechanism for between-sex variation in interests compared to within-sex variation in interests.
I tried to search for other MI studies, and I found some that were kind of opaque. I need to spend more time on this at some point.
Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures.
Personality potentially makes a good example for the phenotypic null hypothesis as applied to sex differences.
There's an absolutely humongous sex difference in strength and general physical formidability. Thus, if there's even a slight within-sex effect of physical formidability on anxiety - such as feeling anxious and fearful about being around big dangerous men - then this effect would generate a substantial sex difference in anxiety. Is that a biological sex difference in anxiety? Yes, in a sense. But is it in contradiction with blank slatist worldviews? No, not really.
This is a testable question. Currently, typical personality tests ask about anxiety in the abstract, e.g. with questions such as "I worry about things". (See for instance N1 in IPIP-NEO.) However there is no reason you cannot ask about more concrete things, such as "I am afraid of drunks in public", "I get anxious when having to talk on the telephone", etc.. recently asked a bunch of people what things they were anxious about, and used this information to construct a set of 60 items asking about concrete types of anxiety. I then collected data on these items. Unfortunately, since the data was not collected to test a sex difference hypothesis, it's quite noisy and hard to be sure about the sex differences, but e.g. the drunks question was the one with the second-largest sex difference, while the telephone telephone item was an item with a sex difference on the smaller side.
I don't plan to do a proper test of this with anxiety specifically, but I do have plans to do a proper test of it with personality more generally. I have been working on a set of personality items that are far more narrow than what is usually used in personality tests, and I plan to collect a ton of data on those items. They may end up overturning the standard HBD view of sex differences in personality by revealing rich sets of phenotypic null hypothesis and cultural associations.
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.
I don't think the multivariate sex difference thing is nearly as important as people make it out to be, because it relies on an extremely careful alignment of the axes, and that would generally not show up in practice.
tailcalled
2yr ago
The phrase "phenotypic null hypothesis" captures a point that is critically important to understand in these sorts of discussions. It can definitely be misused, shouting "phenotypic null hypothesis" is definitely necessary in contexts where people aren't taking it into account. If there are any of my tweets where you feel like I've abused it then feel free to point at them.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Perhaps a better way of phrasing the phenotypic null hypothesis would be "correlation does not imply confounding" together with "causation does not imply unmediated or unmoderated causation". "Correlation does not imply causation" is certainly not it.
tailcalled
2yr ago
It basically boils down to a longwinded form of "correlation doesn't necessary imply causation", i.e. if parents and children show significant correlation on a certain measure, that doesn't guarantee it has a genetic outcome. A good example someone posted downthread would be "knowledege of the French language", which is highly correlated between parents and their children, but which obviously isn't genetic.
I disagree with this presentation of my views. I am admitting that genetics is causally upstream of the heritable variables; the issue is that not every causal link in the chain from genes to the variable are meaningfully biological. I don't think the French example is an example of what I am talking about at all.
He's not really calling out anyone here, and importantly he's not necessarily saying this is an asymmetric problem with HBDers, just that some HBDers do it, which... well of course they do. There are knuckleheads on both sides.
Yes. The thing that triggered it was going through the vault and seeing that a post going "haha, HBDers are so much better than antis" had been declared a "best of".
He seems to mostly just be patrolling the pro-HBD side for bad arguments as a way to advance discussion, not necessarily to dunk on the HBD side as entirely meritless.
Yes, there's a severe need for patrolling for bad arguments IMO. Both sides seem to have turned into echo chambers.
tailcalled
2yr ago
I mean, they obviously don't, see, e.g., grip strength.
Just for reference, do you have data on sex differences in grip strength not correlating with gender equality?
As for the gender equality paradox, that is, that there is less interest in STEM among women in countries that score higher on a variety of gender equality, indices, the correlation is negative.
I realize the correlation is negative and don't see how that's a relevant response to my point about names.
Well, given that a whole host of environmental interventions targetting the mimicking effect that we tried for decades seem to have had - at best - virtually no effect, chances are that these proposed environmental causes don't explain the whole picture, or even large part of it.
Have code camps actually changed girls' perceptions of whether men or women are more likely to end up as programmers? If not, then even if the mimicry hypothesis is true, you wouldn't expect it to change their behavior, and therefore the failure of the intervention is of no evidentiary value for the validity of the mimicry hypothesis.
It seems to me you have created a completely generalisable dismissal against virtually all arguments proposing a biological cause, given that you seem to treat the failure of environmental interventions as a knock against biological explanations. I am not even sure what you are saying here?
?
I don't think I said that failure of environmental interventions is a knock against biological explanations. I just questioned whether the relevant environmental interventions had been tried.
tailcalled
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.
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.
That still seems quite a bit too high to me, and I don't really see how you clearly quantify 'effort'
🤷♀️ I just went with whatever quantification chosen by the leading IQ researcher whose study got signal-boosted. It's quite possible it's bad as I didn't look into it in detail, but if it is bad then I feel like that also reflects badly on HBDers for signal-boosting a study that uses a bad measure.
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'
Those might be correlated with effort. Mood in particular seems likely mediated by effort.
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?
If that's not what you're implying, what is your point in bringing up effort?
My point in bringing up effort is that I was scrolling through my twitter timeline that is filled with social science, and then I saw all the HBDers I followed praising this guy for debunking the notion that IQ is affected by effort. And then I thought, hm, that sounds implausible, I should double-check the statistics, and it turned out the statistics were wrong and actually effort is affected by IQ.
I don't want to replace leftists lying to me about racial difference in g in order to rationalize racial equality with rightists lying to me about effort in IQ tests in order to rationalize racial inequality. I don't think I need special justification for wanting to know the truth about each question in a decoupled way from everything else. But if we absolutely should justify it by practical means, then a straightforward justification would be that this directly contradicts people's experience when filling out tests, and therefore looks delusional to insist on, presumably on the margin reducing the number of people sympathetic to HBD.
tailcalled
2yr ago
edit: I wonder to what degree growing up in a progressive family and school environment already approximates this.
edit: ! Can you test to which degree girls who grow up in prog environments go into programming vs trad? If this thesis is true, shouldn't it have some effect?
The theory is that children mimic same-sex adults, not that children do as same-sex adults tell them to. Doing what adults tell them to would be highly exploitable, so children often contradict instructions from adults.
Masculine/feminine work interests are fairly independent of progressivism/conservativism, so children would not be exposed to more gender-atypical work interests from their parents that way. However I've seen feminists provide a study showing that girls who had more masculine mothers grew up to be more masculine in lifestyle as adults.
But that study seems obviously genetically confounded. However you could adjust for the genetic confounding because the genetic effect should apply to both parents whereas the self-socialization effect should be sex-specific. I considered setting up a study for that once, but I got distracted.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Hm, that seems interesting but unfalsifiable. Even if parents try to pretend really hard that everyone is living in such a culture, can't you always say that the children are picking up on their deep-seated true social beliefs?
For just about any hypothesis, you can of course cook up versions that are unfalsifiable, but I don't think the basic version of the hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Of course direct interventions would be way expensive; but the child psychologists have various experiments they claim supports it that I don't think I've seen a strong HBD response to. (Not to say that I agree with the environmentalists here, I am currently agnostic I think.)
tailcalled
2yr ago
AFAIK the mainstream hypothesis among child developmental psychologists is a self-socialization theory, where children mimic adults in their culture. The whole patriarchy thing is more of a feminist activist thing that doesn't necessarily generalize to the expert's views. Of course the experts might be wrong too, but I'm just saying, as far as I know nobody has tried whether raising children in a culture where math and technical subjects is more of a women's thing works.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Yes, but that probably says something about female interest in STEM, which is probably somewhat correlated with aptitude. You could of course argue that this, too, is caused by an all-pervasive patriarchy, but given that the presence of such programs in a society has a negative correlation with female interest in STEM (i.e. the so-called "gender equality paradox"), I find that harder and harder to believe.
AFAIK just about all sex difference correlate with gender equality, including obviously-societal ones such as gender differences in names:
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1432940616653152259
(And of course it's been shown to apply to e.g. gender stereotypes too, though that could very well be due to stereotype accuracy.)
I don't know why they correlate like this, but I feel like this gives you something equivalent to the phenotypic null hypothesis for the gender equality paradox: if the paradox applies to some variable X, and X is causally upstream of some variable Y, then a priori you'd expect the paradox in X to create a paradox in Y.
There are more people with an interest in, and a knack for, STEM to be found within the male than within the female population. Given that environmental interventions have rather spectactularly failed to reverse course in this regard, Occam's razor would suggest that biology plays a factor here.
The thing is, as kids, boys will look at what men do and mimic that, whereas girls will look at what women do and mimic that. I don't know whether it is the sex difference in programming etc. that is biological, or if it is the sex difference in mimicry that is biological. I wouldn't expect it to be both, because what would that lead to if you took all the world's female programmers and male elementary school teachers and had them create a society where they raised a generation of ordinary children? Would the boys in this society do programming (and thus be mimicking women), or mimic men (and thus do teaching)?
Since I don't know the answer to this question, I can't tell if the sex difference in programming is innate or not.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Don't most girls not participate in such programs? You can only really expect to have an effect on the ones who participate, so if most don't participate, you are closer to not having the program at all than you are to having it for all the girls.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Yes, this is called environmental correlations, it is correct that the phenotypic null hypothesis also predicts the environmental correlation to be high whereas the genetic confounding hypothesis doesn't predict that. (Specifically, the phenotypic null hypothesis predicts every variance component to be correlated, whereas confounding hypotheses only predicts confounded variance components to be correlated.)
Some of the studies on homosexuality and mental illness finds the environmental correlation to be zero, which supports the genetic confounding view. I have at times acknowledged that/pointed that out. I also address the concept in my linked post.
The thing that bothers me is not the conclusion but instead the argument: WHY would HBDers make the argument with genetic correlations in the first place, when clearly it is the environmental correlations that are the key question? Because they don't know the phenotypic null hypothesis. But WHY would HBDers not know the phenotypic null hypothesis when it is such a basic concept for heritability? Because the phenotypic null hypothesis is anmoying and sounds like an outgroup thing, is my hypothesis.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Phenotypic null hypothesis isn't an obscure methodological limitation, it is a fundamental property of concepts like "heritability" and "genetic correlation" which can easily be derived in simulation studies. If you don't understand how it works then you shouldn't use concepts like heritability and genetic correlation at all in the first place.
To begin with: because for most would-be listeners, supporting the opposite camp equals approval of one's family and one's people getting discriminated against (the nigh-inevitable alternative to HBD being acceptance of unredeemed racial guilt). Some are turned off by this; others are quite happy.
I think the honest way of addressing this is "fuck your anti-white racism", not coming up with elaborate justifications that were never epistemically serious to begin with.
HBD/Blank Slate is a political question more than it's a scientific one, a question of whether a civic religion founded on this stated promise of equal innate potential (or at least absence of substantial between-group differences) is needed for the prosperity of a polity and reduction in individual suffering; it's a question of oughts. Turkheimer et al. wear their oughts on their sleeves, adversarially, so it's a bit of a double standard to dunk on HBDers for failing or refusing to understand a peripheral aspect of «is».
This sounds like a scientific metapolitical question as much as it sounds like a political one. See the end of this book review for more discussion.
I have read a decent amount of your writing on the topic today, debate and adjacent content; the more I was reading, the stronger was the feeling that this'll be a fruitless debate. Your writing over the last year displays a trend towards isolated demands for rigor against HBD outlook (for unknown reasons that I assume, for now, are self-preservation and career strategy, a la Abdel The Backstabber, but might be just autistic perfectionism and purity spiraling; take your pick at which is less charitable).
I don't think I have an isolated demand for rigor towards HBD. In other places than the linked ones I regularly challenge anti-HBD. The issue is that neither side wants to be rigorous aka both sides just want to make things up with studies that support their general vibe without checking whether those studies are actually of any evidentiary value.
Now to be clear, the faults of HBDers are not big. [...] Your two examples aren't damning.
Your thread on effort and application of instrumental variables seems to sidestep the problem of scores influencing perception of effort, and anyway it doesn't affect the debate in absence of good evidence for differences in incentives&effort
If scores influence perception of effort, then it would lead to a downwards bias in the estimated effect, not an upwards bias. Also it is not really mathematically plausible that the direction of causality is reversed because that would require an effect size of around 2, whereas unless there are shenanigans going on they should only go up to 1.
And yes I agree that it would be ridiculous to say that the racial differences in IQ are due to differences in effort. The effect of effort is fairly small, so you would need a humongous difference in effort to cause it. The problem is that HBDers do not separate this question from the question of whether effort affects IQ scores, and so they say stupid things like that effort doesn't matter for IQ in order to protect the notion of race differences, when really the obvious answer should be "yes, effort matters but it doesn't explain race differences".
(and, well, whatever happens with low-stakes online IQ testing, people try «as hard as they can» in contexts relevant for long-term life outcomes or even on serious IQ tests).
I don't believe that. I often didn't try as hard as I physically could on exams. For instance once I was done with exams I might leave earlier if allowed instead of checking over my answers for errors, where of course if I had checked over my answers I would inevitably have found some errors and thereby increased my scores. I also never really prepared for exams ahead of time.
Now to be clear, the faults of HBDers are not big. [...] Your two examples aren't damning.
Your triumphant post on the environmental null hypothesis is… inconclusive, since it doesn't bother comparing models following from theories on their predictive merits (and also other twins and pedigree schemes). You can't just «call» ENH like you so often do on Twitter, and certainly can't just assume that nobody accounts for measurement error, that all causal effects will generate genetic correlations, and thus that the usual HBDer touting of gen correlations/gen confounding is invalid.
First, it's phenotypic null hypothesis, not environmental null hypothesis, i.e. if someone is smarter due to having a bigger brain and this bigger brain makes them do better in exams and therefore get more education, then that would be weird to call "environmental"
Secondly, while I can't assume that nobody accounts for measurement error, I can assume that the overwhelming proportion of studies don't account for measurement error, because I've seen that they don't. For an example in the case of personality, see how this shows almost all twin studies on the heritability of personality to be wrong: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/02/getting-personality-right/
And I can totally assume that causal effects between individual difference variables generate genetic correlations between them (as long as they are heritable, but remember, everything is heritable). I gave you the theory and a simulation for why; if you disagree then show me a hypothetical counterexample where there is a causal effect but no induced genetic correlation. This is where I really consider it a big, damning fault, because this is really basic stuff.
A failure to understand the phenotypic null hypothesis is the same tier of error as an environmentalist who assumes that any difference in outcomes must prove that there is racial discrimination. No! Racial differences in abilities also predict racial differences in outcomes. Similarly, nonbiologically mediated/moderated causation predicts heritability and genetic correlations too, not as any sort of bias or measurement error or anything, but simply from the definition of what heritability is. If you don't accept this then you are not seriously engaging in the debate and no better than the environmentalists.
Now it's perfectly reasonable to raise questions about genetic confounding. It's just idiotic/dishonest/??? to say that genetic correlations prove genetic confounding.
Take any actually published model emphasizing environment (i.e. an X factor creating race differences – I mean, okay, the gay-bullying-mental illness stuff at least proposes a half-legible causal pathway), and subject it to scrutiny next to a genetics-first one – most likely, it'll fall apart first.
I am not bringing up the phenotypic null hypothesis as being a debunking of the HBD view on racial differences in intelligence. I agree that it doesn't debunk the HBD view on racial differences in intelligence.
I am bringing it up as a basic fact about heritability how heritability works that HBDers fail to understand/fail to engage with.
tailcalled
2yr ago
Disagreements where Aumann's agreement theorem's assumptions are satisfied rapidly disappear, so whenever you talk about persistent controversies, they will not be satisfied. However, it is still relevant for me to know whether they fail to be satisfied because one side if obstinate, or because both sides are bad, as if it's only one side that's bad then I can just copy my views from the other side.
tailcalled
2yr ago
I agree that it must be all the way on or all the way off, and I would prefer if [it was all the way on and people cared about figuring out the truth].
A few days ago, I made a comment defending Turkheimer and critizing HBDers, in response to a vaulted "best of" comment dismissing Turkheimer. One of the main things my comment centered on was the phenotypic null hypothesis, which can roughly speaking be summarized as "correlation does not imply confounding" + "causation does not imply unmediated and unmoderated causation". Or as I phrased it:
The consensus claimed that this was well-understood by HBDers around here, and perhaps even by HBDers more generally. Now I don't know that I buy that because it really doesn't seem well-understood in many places other than with people around Turkheimer.
In the thread, one person ended up posting an example of a paper which supposedly understood the nuances I was talking about. However, I disagree with that, and think that it is instead an excellent example of the problems with HBD epistemics. For instance, the paper opens by saying that the goal is to test evolutionary psychology hypotheses by testing for heritability in some personality traits:
Now, if you don't appreciate the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this would probably seem like a reasonable or even excellent idea. Evolution is about how genes are selected based on the traits they produce; if something is genetically coded, then evolution must have produced it, and conversely if evolution has produced it then it must be genetic.
But if you appreciate the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this study is of minimal relevance, almost no evidentiary value, and perhaps even eye-rollingly stupid. Of course the scales you administer are going to be heritable, because pretty much everything is heritable. Heritability doesn't mean that you've got anything meaningfully biological.
Now the thing is, my impression is that behavior geneticists do this sort of nonsense all the time, and that HBDers take them seriously when they do it. If HBDers instead properly appreciated the phenotypic null hypothesis, they would look somewhere else for this sort of info, or maybe even fix behavior genetics by propagating the info backwards to HBD-sympathetic behavior geneticists that they should read more Turkheimer. Notably, since this study was suggested as exemplary by someone here on TheMotte, it seems to provide at least an existence proof of someone who does not have a proper understanding of the phenotypic null hypothesis.
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