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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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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.

Key principle of behavior genetics

>Not a single mention in literature until 2002

LOL

In practice, the one side's bad things is slopppy statements (esp. in Twitter where format encourages them) and the other's side bad things are both sloppy statements and coordinated attacks on non-sloppy researchers from other side. There is no symmetry in what you're suggesting.