site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

24
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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:

Put simply, the phenotypic null hypothesis is this: Heritability tells you that if you go up through the chain of causation, then you will often end up with genes. However, there may be many ways that variables can be connected to each other, and there’s no particular reason to expect that every step along the chain of causation from genes to outcomes is best thought of as biological.

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:

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].

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.

If I "appreciate" the 'biological null hypothesis', everything you write is wrong. What necessitates one over the other?

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.

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.

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.

You will have to forgive me but I'm not able to read what you are writing without it coming across to me as rather confusing and incoherent. If you could clarify for me that would be great.

It's the phenotypic null hypothesis, not the environmental null hypothesis.

I don't understand the contention. The point I was making is that the PNH expresses itself in the same way as environmentalist priors. If you believe there is infinite room for enviromentalist theory crafting without holding environmental explanatons to the same standard when it comes to genetic theory crafting then it doesn't matter what you call it. It's always the case that the other side 'could' be wrong and that their assumptions and priors are inaccurate and that there is a hidden factor they could be overlooking that could make them all wrong. What I am trying to tease out here is why you believe that this sort of rigor is some sort of guillotine for HBD'ers but not all the other fields that find no issue ignoring competing hypothesis when attributing their findings as pieces of evidence for their preferred theory.

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).

I am lost as to what you are trying to say in relation to what I wrote. You don't seem to be answering the question of why any assumption of a genetic cause needs to exclude every single possible environmental cause before it can assert itself as a contender or a piece of evidence that fits into a larger theory of how things work. Why is this a problem for HBD'ers?

From the other comment of yours:

What does the biological null hypothesis say?

That the originary primary and ultimate driver for all behavior and expressions of a biological organism in an environment is their genetic material.

What does the biological null hypothesis say?

Tangent but;

I don't know much about the HBD literature so you will have to bear with that.

But in the context HBD is discussed around here (group outcomes and associated CW), is something being heritable or something being genetic not a distinction without a difference? You have to keep in mind this is a CW discussion forum not a HBD discussion forum, so you might not find the best defense of HBD that you are (supposedly) looking for.

Because just about all the CW related conclusions you can pull with the assumption that intelligence is genetic holds if intelligence were merely only heritable but not genetic. I can't think of anything that changes besides the discussion section in obscure intelligence research papers.

Also what evidence would raise your priors of a trait being genetic not merely heritable, other than finding the {X-gene} ?

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.

So here's a question. Can you illustrate specific testable predictions of both theories, and some experiments/measurements in which these predictions differ?

Concretely I'm asking for something like:

Experiment setup: ???

HBD prediction: X

HNU (Human Neural Uniformity) prediction: Y

X != Y

I'm asking because I vaguely recall some conversations during the ban on mentioning HBD (some years back) during which "systemic racism" was constructed as a theory which made identical predictions to HBD. Specifically, it's a force that causes Asians to excel, blacks to underperform, whites to give middling performance, and also it can't be directly measured by any methods in the social sciences.

What is "human neural uniformity"?

HNU is whatever epistemic theory you are pushing in which twin studies have no evidentiary value. My suspicion is that you're playing similar games to folks like Cosma Shalizi - tossing out a bunch of words hinting at the technical unsophistication of HBD proponents, but in reality those words don't mean much of anything.

A great way for you to show yourself to be less vapid would be to post something along the lines:

  1. A twin study measured T to be highly heritable.

  2. HBD proponents predict X as a result of heritable T.

  3. But actually actually ~X in spite of heritable T.

What's wrong with "HBD proponents think heritable T is mraningful evidence for evopsych on T, even though it's not"?

Most folks here (including myself) think "is meaningful evidence" means "results in predictions that are likely to be true". I suspect you mean something entirely different, and are perhaps engaging in wordplay and sophistry to hide the fact that you have no meaningful critique of HBD as a theory that results in testable predictions.

I consider your continued evasion of specifics as evidence in favor of sophistry. But I would think differently if you actually illustrated your claims with examples of specific testable predictions.

It's probably a modification of a moldbug neologism, "Human neurological uniformnity", from a gentle introduction p. 3. It just means - 'human intelligence and psychological traits are evenly distributed across races, no significant inter-race differences'.

But human neural uniformity sounds like a dumb and baseless theory.

Blank slatism

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.

If I understand you correctly, this is what you are calling the Phenotypic Null Hypothesis: that a trait being heritable does not mean it necessarily has a direct genetic cause. 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.

That seems plainly reasonable and true so far as I can tell. 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. 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.

Since blackness is also genetically heritable, if blackness were to cause them to experience racism which causes their test scores to be lower

Note that there have been studies trying to control for this, like this admixture study:

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Using data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we examined whether European ancestry predicted cognitive ability over and above both parental socioeconomicstatus (SES) and measures of eye, hair, and skin color. First, using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we verified that strict factorial invariance held between self-identified African and European-Americans. The differences between these groups, which were equivalent to 14.72 IQ points, were primarily (75.59%) due to difference in general cognitive ability (g), consistent with Spearman’s hypothesis. We found a relationship between European admixture and g. This relationship existed in samples of (a) self-identified monoracial African-Americans (B = 0.78, n = 2,179), (b) monoracial African and biracial African-European-Americans, with controls added for self-identified biracial status (B = 0.85, n = 2407), and (c) combined European, African-European, and African-American participants, with controls for self-identified race/ethnicity (B = 0.75, N = 7,273). Controlling for parental SES modestly attenuated these relationships whereas controlling for measures of skin, hair, and eye color did not.

So black people with 30% European ancestry do better on the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery than those with 10% European ancestry, which is already some remarkably fine-grained racism. But people do talk about "colorism" and so they look at genes linked to skin/hair/eye color, but those genes don't seem to have an impact when ancestry is accounted for.

Skin color (assessed genetically with the highly accurate predictor [79, 93] was associated with cognitive ability (Model 1b, Table 5), but made no significant incremental contribution when ancestry was also in the model (Model 2, Table 5). Results could still be due to phenotypic confounding from other appearance variables. To test this possibility, we fitted a number of models including skin, hair, and eye color. We found that none of these features had significant effects on their own, except for brown eye color, which was positively related to cognitive ability, but with a large standard error.

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Note that the anti-HBD crowd (i.e. the Turkheimer side of the debate) have put in some effort to make the author of this publication Bryan J. Pesta, a tenured professor (!), unemployable. I've mentioned this in my first response to tailcalled, but some choice quotes from a Chronicle article praising the cancellation, to understand how the perception of ambiguity in this topic is maintained, indeed how the sausage gets made. It reads very much like a 30's Pravda report on courageous pioneers catching and handling a villain wrecker kulak to the authorities, Scooby Doo style, but that's the clownish reality of the American academia.

Liam O’Brien was a master’s student in political science at Cleveland State University in 2019 when a screenshot from a new article, titled “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” crawled across his Twitter feed.

To the untrained eye, the abstract was highly technical. “Using the ancestry-adjusted association between MTAG eduPGS and g from the monoracial African-American sample as an estimate of the transracially unbiased validity of eduPGS (B = 0.124),” the authors wrote, “the results suggest that as much as 20%-25% of the race difference in g can be naïvely explained by known cognitive ability-related variants.”

The argument dressed up in that statistical jargon? That Black people are genetically disposed to be less intelligent than white people.

O’Brien was disturbed to see that debunked racial-hierarchy arguments popular in the late 19th and early 20th century had a toehold in modern academe. Scientifically rigorous research arguing that intelligence is inherited is itself controversial, but few geneticists take seriously the claim that intelligence is racially linked.

His dismay turned to outrage when he discovered that one of the authors, Bryan J. Pesta, was a tenured professor in Cleveland State’s business school. His home institution was essentially providing a soapbox for racist pseudoscience.

O’Brien had a history of political activism, so he did what came naturally, talking to students and professors about Pesta’s article, and trying to get him censured. [...]

A look at Pesta’s RateMyProfessors page shows students generally rated him very highly, describing him as “hilarious,” “interesting,” and “easy.” One warned: “If you’re easily offended, you might not like some of his jokes, especially when he compares certain graphs to phallic symbols.” But none of the 74 reviews complains about racism.

The Chronicle reached out to 10 Black students who graduated from the business school with bachelor’s or master’s degrees in 2022. Of the three who replied, none said they were familiar with Pesta.

“Literally 100s of Black students have taken my classes,” Pesta wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “I’ve won merit pay for teaching many times. I was regard [sic] as among the best teachers in the business college.”

“If I were racist, or even overly political,” he wrote, “I submit I would have been exposed by now.” [..]

Many racial hereditarians present their claims as widely accepted but deliberately suppressed facts in the scientific community. They blame the political correctness of academe for their difficulty publishing in well-respected journals.

Their critics argue that shoddy scholarship and a refusal to account for developments in the study of genetics keep racial hereditarians marginal. Even respected scholars who believe genes play a role in intelligence argue that the role of environmental factors is too complicated and profound to disentangle. Behavioral geneticists like Kathryn Paige Harden and Eric Turkheimer repudiate the idea that IQ differences between races are rooted in genetics. [..]

For “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” in 2019, Pesta had three co-authors: Jordan Lasker, John G.R. Fuerst, and Emil O.W. Kirkegaard. The Chronicle attempted to contact all of them via publicly listed email addresses, but received no replies.

[a section on trying to find their vulnerabilities]

Thomas E. Schläpfer, a research clinical psychiatrist at Germany’s University of Freiburg who studies interventional biological psychiatry, took charge of the journal in 2020. He said he had been unaware until contacted by The Chronicle of Pesta’s publication or any problems with his brief tenure as editor.

After reading Pesta’s article, he wrote, “While the scientific methods sound impressive, I find the hypothesis both ludicrous and demeaning.” [...]

O’Brien, the political-science graduate student, tried not to let Pesta’s work go ignored. He gathered students from various activist groups to make an action plan. One group put out an email blast inviting interested students to a Zoom meeting on the subject.

Many of the attendees were familiar faces. But one, who joined the call under a pseudonym and left his camera off, made organizers wary. He said he was an undergraduate but offered little else by way of introduction. After some prodding, he messaged one of the organizers his CSU email address, which contained his last name: Fuerst. The organizers shut down the meeting, then reconvened among themselves. They had been infiltrated. If Fuerst knew they were going after Pesta, then Pesta himself surely also knew.

But across the country, geneticists at other universities had set in motion institutional processes focused not on Pesta’s racist claims but on his violation of the norms and regulations of academe.

He had already been on one geneticist’s radar when “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability” was published in Psych.

Luke Miller (a pseudonym) is an early-career scientist who has long been rankled by racial hereditarians. As a geneticist, he said, he feels a responsibility to combat the harm done by the fringes of the scientific community. (The Chronicle has used a pseudonym for Miller and left some other early-career researchers in this article unnamed because they fear professional repercussions.) [...]

More alarmingly, the paper cited data from the National Institutes of Health’s Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP). The federal agency has strict controls governing who may use its data and how. It struck Miller as improbable that the NIH had given Pesta’s paper the green light, or would have even given him access to the data, if the agency had known what he planned to do with it.

Miller was tapped into a network of researchers across the country who felt similarly about hereditarianism. Together, four of them combed the methodology section of Pesta’s article and compiled evidence that he had violated NIH policies.

According to the paper’s methodology section, the data was uploaded to at least two servers: the Michigan Imputation Server, a University of Michigan program that deduces genes that haven’t been included in a sample; and HIrisPlex-S, a web application that deduces phenotypes like eye, hair, and skin color from genetic data. While only Pesta received permission to use the NIH data, and named none of his co-authors in the requests, Miller said he and the other whistle-blowers had inferred that others would have had to have access to it to do the analysis the paper described. [...]

Taylor works on an NIH-backed project called the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. His work uses genetic data from across ethnicities to look at risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The painstaking approval processes he and his colleagues must go through — applying for IRB approval for every study, taking yearly refresher courses on the ethics of using human subjects, and signing data-use agreements — is “cumbersome in many ways,” he said.

”We complain about it to each other as well, but it’s necessary,” he added. Such safeguards in human research came about because of past abuses that poisoned many people’s faith in medical research. They’re designed to ensure that scientists don’t use subjects’ personal information in ways they would find abhorrent.

The letter set a June 2021 deadline for the university to destroy all initially approved copies of the genetic data and find out whether any unapproved copies of the data had been made. The agency also revoked Pesta’s permission to use NIH data for any existing projects, and banned him from obtaining any NIH data for the next three years. [...]

According to a letter sent to Pesta by the then provost, Laura Bloomberg — who has since been tapped as CSU’s president — the university confirmed the NIH’s findings. It also found Pesta had lied to a staff member in CSU’s research office when he said the data would be kept in a university-owned laptop and he would be the only one with access.

Pesta said he had requested and received approval from both Cleveland State and the NIH to store the data on a home computer.

“Those bastards totally ignored me when I pointed it out,” he added.

Bloomberg ultimately found that Pesta’s conduct had damaged the university’s reputation and could impede other professors’ ability to do research.

Cleveland State declared that Pesta had been incompetent or dishonest in teaching or scholarship; neglected his duty, and engaged in personal conduct that substantially impaired the fulfillment of his institutional responsibilities; and interfered with the normal operations of the university. The letter declared Bloomberg’s decision to fire Pesta.

Pesta was officially fired on March 4, 2022, two and a half years after his article was published.

etc.

Due to some issues I haven't had the opportunity to engage with the HBD/PNH discussion or indeed to read themotte recently.

That reads like satire, but only a hack would actually name the chief commissar "O’Brien."

And there are people who will look you in the eye and not just defend this behavior, but threaten you for questioning it. Vile.

Motte: "a trait being heritable does not mean it necessarily has a direct genetic cause"

Bailey: "a trait being heritable is not evidence that it has a direct genetic cause, and the base assumption should be that it does not have a direct genetic cause until very strong evidence exists that it does"

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.

A few days ago, I made a comment defending Turkheimer and critizing HBDers, in response to a vaulted "best of" comment dismissing 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.

In response to your comment, @DaseindustriesLtd already shared proof that Turkheimer confessed to being epistemically irrational about HBD:

And because whatever the faults of HBDers, the other side remains epistemologically worse. Turkheimer may have some legitimate scientific argument against between-group genetic diffs on g; his bottom line was still arrived at through moralizing. «We can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.»

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?

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?

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.

  • -10

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.

I think you'd get more useful engagement and replies if, instead of saying 'phenotypic null hypothesis' a lot and explaining the theory of what it means, you tried to explain in a 'teaching' type way how and why it matters - like, laid out a few toy examples of populations that seem to be HBD-ish if you don't account for PNH but PNH means that heritability is explained by underlying mechanisms that are less HBD-ish.

It's not perfect that interlocutors aren't doing that work themselves, but - I spent an hour yesterday diving deep into something I disagreed with, made a long post here, came out understanding it a bit better but nothing really conclusive, and got zero replies. I could do that again, sure, but I have other stuff to do, so maybe later! People do that a lot here, but it takes enough time they won't do it every time.

"because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair"

What do you make of that then? Suppose the Catholic Church said "it is a matter of ethnical principle that the sun revolves around the Earth." No further arguments they made for geocentrism would be epistemically interesting. We shouldn't trust anything they say on the topic. Once someone confesses to being uninterested in the pursuit of truth, indeed to being the enemy of the truth conditional on its content, it's folly to engage with them for the purpose of pursuing the truth.

In sum: Turkheimer is a propagandist on this topic, he admitted as much, and it's a waste of time to engage with his arguments on the topic if you have any interest in finding the truth.

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.

Reading and understanding these arguments takes significant investment. So we need to use some manner of rational principle to decide which arguments are worth the investment to understand and engage with. That the argument is endorsed by Eric Turkheimer (a confessed propagandist) and @tailcalled (from my perspective, a random and unknown internet person who describes him or herself on Twitter as an autistic hobbyist gender researcher) does not come close to surmounting the threshold of reputability that it would take to persuade me to engage with it.

Just as physicists are loathe to engage with (and likely debunk) random cranks who come bearing plans for perpetual motion machines, and number theorists are loathe to engage with (and likely debunk) random cranks who come bearing new schemes for cryptography, no one should feel compelled to spend the investment that it takes to engage with (and likely debunk) whatever latest wad of argumentative complexity Turkheimer has concocted to further his political end. The fact that you personally vouch for it means nothing to me.

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.

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?

More comments

This is exactly the conclusion I came to as well. tailcalled seems more interested in obfuscating and claiming we can't know anything than clarifying and getting closer to the truth (despite occasional protestations of the opposite).

because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.

I'm not going to defend Turkheimer, because I don't know the guy, and a lot of academic scholars strike me as absolutely sleazy, but I think I can defend the argument.

Aquota says below:

As is constantly stated, HBD is most commonly used as an alternative to a racism of the gaps.

Sure, maybe people here and now use it this way, but it's not like we haven't seen slippery slopes happen in real time. An ironic example is "racism of the gaps" itself, didn't we get here from a completely reasonable "maybe everyone should have equal rights"? This leads me to being quite sympathetic to the idea of just tabooing anything that might lead to pushing collective responsibility. Of course the rules of such a taboo would have to be a lot different than what we have now, banning HBD while pushing CRT is unjust, and not even a stable equilibrium (and I suppose this is why we are where we are).

You're just defending being a propagandist, treating the truth and knowledge as a pawn to be sacrificed instrumentally to advance your political goals.

And I'm fully supportive of people who feel that way to confess as much, so that those of us interested in the truth for its own sake know not to waste our time by treating their arguments as being made in good faith.

I see where you're coming from, but I do take issue with being portrayed as bad faith. If I was bad faith, I wouldn't come out and declare I want to taboo an entire field of knowledge, I'd do what everyone else does, and just scream "raaacist!".

I'm accusing Turkheimer of bad faith, not you. But in any event, there are plenty of instrumental reasons to adopt a false tone of scientific analysis when engaging in bad faith reasoning, not least because it's so much easier to dismiss people who start and finish with allegations of racism.

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.

The phenotypic null hypothesis is an invention of Eric Turkheimer, who confessed to being a propagandist -- the receipts are upthread. How on earth could it possibly be rational for an epistemic rationalist to even invest the time to understand his argument when he has already revealed that his arguments will have only a coincidental relationship with the truth? It's a waste of time and energy, and he intends it to be exactly that.

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.

Counterpoint: There is no useful correlation between what Turkheimer says on this topic and the truth, because he has already admitted that his conclusions are determined by his ethical positions rather than by the pursuit of truth.

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?

Yes, when you control for factors X, Y and Z, whatever remains is going to be what shows up on the graph. That is what "controlling for" means. Where HBD-tards drop the ball is the transition form "things like height, athletics ability, show high degrees of heritability" to "judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

  • -25

"judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

This is a gross mischaracterization of the HBD position and you know it. I, and every other HBD supporter I know of in the rationalist community supports judging individual people by their actual qualities. The only difference is that we don't expect such judgements to find exactly equal distributions of talent in each race.

I have literally never seen a rationalist HBD supporter who argues that a demonstrably talented individual should be denied opportunity because of their race

This is a gross mischaracterization

No, it is not a gross mischaracterization. It is the bailey in contrast to the motte. I have had arguments whicthn users in this very thread about how equality before the law is not the same thing as fungibility.

Where HBD-tards drop the ball is the transition form "things like height, athletics ability, show high degrees of heritability" to "judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

Can you name any specific HBD-tards?

I am not aware of any HBD believer/tolerant people who say "a 7 foot tall white man who never misses free throws should be banned from the NBA" or "a black teenager with perfect SATs who won the math olympiad should be rejected from Caltech". Can you cite some of them?

Can you name any specific HBD-tards?

A handful in this forum but I'm already in the dog house with the mods.

  • -10

Lol I totally believe you that they exist, but you just can't link to them cause "the mods".

Speaking as a mod, there certainly are people with those beliefs on this forum, but no, it is not encouraged to call people out by name as examples of "People who believe shitty things."

If "HBD" now also has to include the extreme weakman positions of people who just want a scientific fig-leaf for racist blanket dismissal (of badly-performing groups), is there any group identification you are okay with the people like me who don't hold those positions? I genuinely believe that intelligence is heritable, there are significant differences in averages between groups and want to judge people by their individual qualities and find any policy that treats people differential based on race or ethnicity to be morally highly unpalatable. Do you not believe me that these are my positions, or do you just think that I am not allowed to hold these without taking responsibility for any cover this might give to people who believe in the first two but not the second two?

HBD-tards

Don't do this. Straight-up calling your opponents retards is not how arguments work here and you know it.

Where HBD-tards drop the ball is the transition form "things like height, athletics ability, show high degrees of heritability" to "judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

That wasn't remotely the topic of conversation.

The answer is the same though.

  • -15

But "HBD-tards" do not advocate for this generally. As is constantly stated, HBD is most commonly used as an alternative to a racism of the gaps.

Not "generally", only when they are forced to retreat from the bailey to the motte. Hence the derision aimed towards "blank-slatists" and the like.

  • -10

If this is so I only care about the motte, if you find me outside of it feel free to let me know. But it really does not seem like people are willing to grant the motte.

Reliance on the "phenotypical null hypothesis" is uninteresting, and really I find the name to be ridiculous as it is just simply asserting an unearned null hypothesis status. 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. Sure, granted. 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. 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.

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.

I forget who exactly said it but there was a comment from a long term regular in another HBD thread from a couple weeks back to the effect of "the problem with the high degree of overlap between parentage and culture is that it gives people evidence to falsely claim that culture matters more than genetics."

It seems to me that the inverse is equally true. That the high degree of overlap between parentage and culture is that it gives people evidence to falsely claim that genetics matters more than culture.

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.

I'd offer a third take: it's likely that the high degree of overlap between parentage and culture is due to the mutual influence each has upon the other, over time, to the point that there are very good reasons it's difficult to tease the two apart.

Genetics shapes culture. If a group has a higher than normal tendency to reclusiveness, or aggression, or neuroticism, or quantitative ability, etc., then if the resulting society is to be successful, it must shape its institutions to both offset the negative impacts of that tendency as well as guide the positive aspects in a productive direction. Successful institutions must deal with people as they exist, not as anyone wishes them to be.

Culture shapes genetics. Culture is what determines status, and status heavily influences who has an easier time contributing his genes to the next generation.

Overall, I'd say the blank-slatists are trivially wrong, and the HBDers are directionally correct, but that it's unfortunately easy to overstate one's case.

My father retired from thirty years at a job which I intuitively understood before I was ever hired there under him. My mother and I both do desktop publishing. Our family’s favorite game is Perquackey, the Scrabble-style dice game, and we each have a copy. None of us have Scrabble.

Brain genes are remarkable.

Certainly. I can take a look at my immediate family, and link up all sorts of similarities in terms of likes/dislikes, talents, emotional reactivity, communication style, etc. It's just that this sort of observation can't really separate nature vs. nurture when you're linked by both genes and experience.

Though once you've gone through the massive stack of adoption studies, twin studies, everything-we're-allowed-to-do-ethically studies, etc., you find that both matter a lot.

There's a pattern in the interaction that I suspect is very common. Take height as an example. Your maximum potential height is genetically determined, full stop. But your actual height as a fraction of that potential is environmentally determined--did you get adequate nutrition as a child? Did your legs get amputated in a car accident?

That said, this is more examining individual cases and family clusters, rather than the trends of population genetics.

Is cultural intervention honestly any more palatable than genetic pessimism to the opponents of hbd? Stop doing damage to society and you can examine the issue at your leisure. But if you're going to impose large costs on me and mine you need to have real receipts.

But also, that groups vary in average just trivially follows from the idea that different individuals can vary on the same measures. Any randomly selected group will vary to some degree just due to internal variance and it takes very little selective pressure to make that variance larger. It would require some kind of miracle for groups that were isolated for thousands of years to not vary somewhat and then we're just haggling on price.

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.

Is cultural intervention honestly any more palatable than genetic pessimism to the opponents of hbd?

I'm not sure what exactly what you're asking here. But if you're asking whether I think having a common culture/values matters more to building healthy communities racial homogeneity? or do I believe that growing up in a middle-class two-parent household has a greater effect on a child's life outcomes than the melanin content of their skin? the answer is "Yes, Absolutely."

Growing in two-parent household isn't an independent variable. Earlier, a parent might die to war or natural causes, or slave master moved them to another location. Now, in rich 1 st world countries, living with 1 parent is usually because one or both parents are bad at impulse control (assholes), which is correlated with intelligence and anything.

That is not a rebuttal.

I've seen SAT scores broken out by race and income that suggests income is less predictive.

Perhaps academic achievement is less culturally valued in the gaps.

Have there been any successful interventions promoting 2-parent households?

Depends on how you define "successful intervention" the problem being that cultural interventions are effectively monstrous in the eyes of the blue tribe and thus there is a vested interest within academia to undermine and denying any success.

cultural interventions are effectively monstrous in the eyes of the blue tribe

Do you mean cultural interventions promoting stability and 'tradition'? That tribe seems all-in on interventions promoting alphabet people or degeneracy.

As for defining success, improved performance of family formation where the children are born to married parents where everyone lives in the home and at least one parent works in gainful employment. No extra-marital births to either adult could be a 'stretch' goal.

Blacks had better family formation in the past, prior to the sexual revolution, so it's the other way around but amounts to the same thing. We do in fact know that blacks as a population can actually form stable families, because we've seen them do it. yes, there was still a gap between the best outcomes we've observed for blacks and the best outcomes we've observed for whites, but we also observe that gaps between whites and Jews and Asians don't actually cause problems by themselves absent aggressive race-baiting. It's at least a plausible route to laying race to rest.

They can, but in current year they don't.

Have there been any successful interventions promoting 2-parent households?

I believe he means that the socially-acceptable alternative to HBD is not cultural explanations, and the socially-acceptable alternative to any solutions HBD might imply is not changing the culture of the group with the poor outcomes. Rather, it's "blame and punish whitey".

Firstly, "socially acceptable" to whom? Secondly, what of it?

I believe that if you were to ask the median conservative or a middle-class black person about achievement gaps, black criminality, collapse of black-owned businesses/neighborhoods over the last 60 years, or any of the other negative trends that HBDists like to blame on genetics, that their response would be something about the "crisis of black fatherhood".

However you're unlikely to hear anything about this in blue-aligned spaces (be they libertarian, progressive, or reactionary) because acknowledging it calls a number of deeply held blue-tribe beliefs about personal emancipation, internal vs external loci of control, collective vs individual guilt, the role of the nuclear family (or lack there of) into question.

Journalists and academia. They're not 50% conservaties. What your median conservatives says is irreleveant

Journalists and academia.

and what "Journalists and academia" say is relevant somehow?

Firstly, "socially acceptable" to whom?

To the group which is in power and controls the Overton window.

Secondly, what of it?

If the explanation is not socially acceptable, remedies which rely on the explanation being true will not be socially acceptable either, and therefore will not be implemented. So the problem will remain and will continue to be blamed on whitey.

Do you genuinely believe that any one group actually controls the overton window?

Sounds to me like you're choosing to be blamed.

Do you have a graph comparing the educational outcomes of middle-class two-parent black Americans to non-middle-class non-two-parent Jewish-Americans?

I'm not an HBDist.

I believe that growing up in a middle-class two-parent household has a greater effect on a child's life outcomes than

Because you don't have evidence, it looks like "I believe that growing up in a middle-class two-parent household has a greater effect on a child's life outcomes than" is based on faith

I suspect it's got a lot more evidence both observational and academic than your nebulous claims about group differences in IQ do.

You are of course aware we are able to control for being raised middle class and having a two-parent household, correct? I think you know what I mean by cultural intervention, are the opponents of HBD wiling to tell underperforming groups that they are raising their kids wrong and need to be forced to change how they raise their kids? Not that I would support this even if it would work, it would be a monstrous thing. But that's what you mean by a culture explanation right?

You are of course aware we are able to control for being raised middle class and having a two-parent household, correct?

I am aware, the question is are you?

Am I aware of what? That your proposed examples are baked in already? why would this support your position?

Essentially what @PutAHelmetOn said, by controlling for factors that are not genetics you are effectively baking the assumption that genetics is the primary causal factor into your study.

As for whether the cultural explanation is "monstrous" well that's one of the fundamental points of disagreement between the blue tribe and the red.

More comments

Not the poster you replied to but I hope I don't do his argument a disservice.

Maybe being raised in a middle class house with two parents causes good outcomes, just like genes cause good outcomes. Then, controlling for one would show a correlation with the other (and outcomes).

How do studies usually show "greater effect" in situations like these? Do two studies with different controls and compare at the correlations? How is "greater effect" defined?

More comments

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 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. Do you think you have a much different answer here than HBDers?

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?

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 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.

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.

The relevant distinction to basically any conversation where this comes up: is heritability of income due to your skin color phenotype or your doing jobs that are valued by society well phenotype?

If you want to argue that actually heritability of income is because Asians display the "smart" phenotype and blacks display the "dumb" phenotype and smartness gets rewarded in 2022 USA, you are not disagreeing with any HBD advocate. You are merely saying "aha, if we stopped rewarding intelligence with higher income then this would change", which none of them would disagree with if it were stated clearly.

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.

But so what if it is due to people treating you phenotypically? This is still genetic causation. It might indeed be interesting to some to figure out exactly through what mechanisms differences in genes result differences in income, but how exactly is this relevant for our ability to predict real world outcome of our policies? Can you show one example where “naive” (according to you) HBD would get some real world application seriously wrong, compared to approach informed by your phenotypic casual pathway correction?

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.

it is relevant to know that heritability is of no evidentiary value.

You have not shown this. You've merely shown that heritability is not 100% ironclad.

I await your answer as to which concrete predictions HBDers will get wrong due to neglect of this.

Dude, read a few twin studies, they find that pretty much everything is heritable, of course heritability is of no evidentiary value.

Dude, read a few twin studies, they find that pretty much everything is heritable, of course heritability is of no evidentiary value.

Really? Twin studies suggest that a Korean baby raised by Americans will speak Korean? An Indian baby raised by Mormon parents will grow up Hindu?

There's plenty of non-heritable traits. Hence, heritability has evidentiary value.

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.

More comments

This is probably the lousiest attempt at making an argument that I have seen here. The only way you could have made it worse is if you waved a credential.

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).

I am not asking you how things morally ought to be. What I am asking you is to provide an example of a peril that awaits HBDers if they ignore your pet concern. Is there any?

You need to understand that for me and many people, the entire point of research in this (and many other) area is to guide our real world behavior, policy making, and to answer questions like “if we want to achieve X, will doing Y work? If not, what will?”. Can you provide any non artificial example of a scenario where naively taking heritability as representing “direct biological” (whatever one understands by that) casual mechanism, will lead us to substantially different policy than when one observes that genes only actually act through phenotype, and it’s the phenotype that interacts with the real world?

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.

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. You can’t even provide any example why your pet concern is relevant for me at all! I think you are wasting everyone’s time, and I think this behavior should be purged from the discussions. If you don’t like your pet concern being ignored, you should make sure to understand it.

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.

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats