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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32430 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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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.

I'm glad you've agreed that twin studies have at least some evidentiary value. Thanks to twin studies we know that intelligence and many personality traits might be genetic but native language definitely isn't.

Now the question is simply how much non-zero evidentiary value twin studies have. Perhaps you have something to contribute on that topic, but I suspect not.

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).

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