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

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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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.

It is a lie.

If we study fighting abilities of men vs women, controlling for upper body muscle mass, does it bake in assumption that form of genitals is more important to fighting than muscle?

This seems like a confused idea around what controlling for factors means. If the difference persists after the controlling then those factors are not responsible for the difference. If the difference goes away then the controlled factors are shown to actually be causal. If you could control 100% of non genetic factors you'd have an exact measure of the genetic component's impact. If you could control 100% of genetic factors then you'd get an exact measure of environment.

This seems like a confused idea around what controlling for factors means. If the difference persists after the controlling then those factors are not responsible for the difference. If the difference goes away then the controlled factors are shown to actually be causal.

Yes, I get that and my point is that this cuts both ways. IE when you control for genetics the differences don't go away. A cynic such as myself might suspect that this is why HBDist seem to hate talking about effect sizes

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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?

One typically compares outcomes of identical twins vs. fraternal twins (who are as related to each other as regular siblings). If the correlation between identical twins is the same as correlation between fraternal twins, it means that it’s probably not genes that are causing the outcomes. If, instead, outcomes of identical twins are more highly correlated than outcomes of fraternal twins, that suggests that the casuality is genetic. This is because both fraternal and identical twins are sharing the same home environment (of, say, middle class home with two parents), so if it was the shared environment that was causing all of the outcomes, you wouldn’t expect the correlation between outcomes of identical twins to be different than that of fraternal twins.

The traditional method is to look at twins raised separately. The genes are held constant because twins but with different environments. To cut it all short most measures correlate much more strongly with birth parent than adoptive parent.

Not really, twins raised apart are rather too rare to be practically useful. Instead, one typically compares identical twins vs fraternal twins or non-twin siblings, or biological siblings vs adopted siblings.

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