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Notes -
To people arriving late to this discussion, a couple of things might be helpful to know:
When tailcalled is saying "heritability doesn't mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean", his actual argument isn't presented in his post. You'd need to go track it down through the link he posted of his substack. 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.
When tailcalled says "HBDers often signal-boost nonserious or dishonest studies", he's mainly referring to people doing this repeatedly on his Twitter posts". 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.
So in the end, I think tailcalled is making points that are agreeable almost to the point of being anodyne, but he wrote them poorly enough that some people (including me, at least initially) are getting confused. On #1, we really shouldn't be forced to track down the basic gist of an argument on another website before the author starts claiming it's a big reason why the HBD-vs-Environment debate isn't advancing. On #2, I think a lot of people got the sense that tailcalled was an anti-HBD'er, but the opposite seems to be true actually. 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.
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.
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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.
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".
Yes, there's a severe need for patrolling for bad arguments IMO. Both sides seem to have turned into echo chambers.
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