site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The effects of epigenitics, microbiota, and environmental cells are just quite small. The evidence just isn't there. Environmental confounding is very well addressed by existing studies. "lack of an actual genetic explanation" - again, complex traits are extremely polygenic.

Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.

There are significant and obvious causal factors, like for instance lead exposure:

Overall, Black children had an adjusted +0.83 µg/dL blood Pb (95% CI 0.65 to 1.00, p < 0.001) and a 2.8 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (95% CI 1.9 to 3.9, p < 0.001). When stratified by risk factor group, Black children had an adjusted 0.73 to 1.41 µg/dL more blood Pb (p < 0.001 respectively) and a 1.8 to 5.6 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (p ≤ 0.05 respectively) for every selected risk factor that was tested. For Black children nationwide, one in four residing in pre-1950 housing and one in six living in poverty presented with an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL. In conclusion, significant nationwide racial disparity in blood Pb outcomes persist for predominantly African-American Black children even after correcting for risk factors and other variables.

See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7084658/

And how exactly do they account for the elements that are not well studied? Like for instance volatile organic compounds in the air and poorer air circulation/higher CO2 levels at home? Being poor puts people closer to environmental contaminants that have large and well-known effects on the overall intelligence of people.

To be clear, do you acknowledge that the motivated reasoning is present both ways?

Yes absolutely.

And how exactly do they account for the elements that are not well studied? Like for instance volatile organic compounds in the air and poorer air circulation/higher CO2 levels at home? Being poor puts people closer to environmental contaminants that have large and well-known effects on the overall intelligence of people.

Those would show up as shared environment in twin/adoption/sibling studies. We see, universally, low shared environment in every research method tried. These hypotheses have been tested and found wanting.

Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.

Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.

Crucially, I stated that environmental confounding was well addressed for the heritability of intelligence among individuals, and that this is the consensus. I am not claiming that the scientific consensus claims environmental confounding has been addressed as an issue for the heritability of intelligence contributing to group differences.

Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.

I don't doubt that intelligence is heritable; however on a group level there is very little actual diversity within the human population given the fact that our most common ancestor is very recent, and HBD is making claims about the average intelligence of different groups.

The simple way to settle this would be to:

A. Discover the genes responsible for intelligence. B. Genetically test a significant number of various groups to get a baseline rate of their presence. C. Derive the genetic difference in intelligence between groups.

Has anyone actually done this?

  • -11

Has anyone actually done this

As described before, the are thousands of variants responsible for variation in intelligence in existing populations (as distinct from 'responsible for intelligence', there are many more nucleotides sequences that are necessary for intelligence and don't have any variation in the population because you're disabled or dead without them). This is the only paper I could find: http://pfigshare-u-files.s3.amazonaws.com/2134951/NineHits__3_5.pdf and there's a graph inside it which shows that the populations HBDers claim are low IQ have lower polygenic scores for intelligence. Now, it's just one paper, I think it's as likely to be biased/wrong as it is to be meaningful. There isn't more research into this because as I said it's considered racist, and in order to do a proper study you'd need a lot of biobanks and research approval to get the data, and they don't want you to be racist. They even restrict research that's only tangentially related: https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there

You keep saying there's very little diversity. What counts as little? What's your scale? What would be enough diversity, and why that threshold?

There's very obviously enough that we can plainly notice it for some traits, and you haven't acknowledged this.

Modern humans are a lot alike--at least at the genetic level--compared with other primates. If you compare any two people from far-flung corners of the globe, their genomes will be much more similar than those of any pair of chimpanzees, gorillas, or other apes from different populations. Now, evolutionary geneticists have shown that our ancestors lost much of their genetic diversity in two dramatic bottlenecks that sharply squeezed down the population of modern humans as they moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.

See: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-we-lost-our-diversity

Yes, this is true.

Now, why is it enough to matter? If the problem was that the out-of-Africa bottleneck of ~10000 or whatever it was, was too small, is there some higher number at which it would make sense to talk about variation being relevant?

Being much more similar at a genetic level than average does not mean that they are similar along any particular trait, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly, and there is clearly enough variation that we can see some traits vary.

My point isn't to disagree that humans have lower genetic diversity than chimpanzees or whatever (especially if we are excluding the most genetically diverse groups like the pygmies, sticking to the majority of the world's population), that's just true, and you're right on that. But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence, not at all a serious consideration.

But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence.

I'm bringing it up because genes do matter, but there simply isn't nearly as much diversity within the human population which means the overall effect of genetics cannot be large on a population level. It tempers the overall impact of any kind of diversity, the fact that we humans are so similar. I simply do not believe that HBD as seemingly commonly held in this forum is nearly strong enough as a concept to use it as a battering ram to dismiss or deflect the mainstream or the left wing's position on this matter.

I thought I made the comment clear. You still didn't answer, but just repeated what you were saying.

I'll try again: You keep saying that humans have less genetic diversity, therefore there cannot be any substantial genetic effect. But you have yet to show that that's a valid inference. How do you know that the lesser degree of diversity in comparison to chimpanzees or whatever means they can't vary along relevant traits? Why isn't it the case that we have less, but still quite enough, diversity?

As evidence that there's probably enough, we notice variation attributable to genetics in all sorts of other things.

Relevant traits such as height, weight, intelligence etc? Compare Europe with Japan, they are very similar and yet separated by thousands of kilometers.

I see this HBD talk here constantly, yet it seems everyone assumes that it is true without bringing evidence, where is the proof for such a bold claim?

More comments

Once again, how do you explain height differences?

How much difference would you accept as reasonable based on genetics? Clearly, one standard deviation is too much. A half maybe?

You’re right about the overall limits of variance we are going to see among human populations.

However.

In the grand scheme of things, 85, 100, and 115 IQs are not a huge amount of variation for our species anymore than 5’5”, 5’10”, and 6’3” heights are.

At some point we will have exhausted plausible environmental explanations for the achievement gap.

In fact, we already have, as evidenced by arguments serving as excuses that it would take centuries to get past the effects of misfortune (an order of magnitude more than what the Supreme Court thought), and that ever-present “systemic racism” is behind any disparity, with no need to show actual evidence of racism.

The tide of the evidence is being pulled in one direction along multiple fronts, and so people want to pretend we have the same understanding of genetics as 50+ years ago when it was less clear and explicit oppression was far worse and more recent.

To my friends, everything; to my enemies, epistemic humility.

The average height of a Chinese man is 170cm and the average height of a European man is 180cm. The difference between the two is only a little above 5% on average with recent males being 175cm which indicates that much of this disparity is not genetic, but environmental. This represents populations that are separated by the largest continent in the world.

See: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202110/1235772.shtml

How much difference would you accept as reasonable based on genetics? Clearly, one standard deviation is too much. A half maybe?

Honestly, probably less than half a standard deviation but probably not nothing. It's not really that important though, because I believe that there are significant gains that can be had if the environmental influences are taken into consideration and ameliorated.

More comments

There's plenty of room in the human genome for large differences in polygenic traits or Japanese and Norwegians would be the same average height.

Edit: Not to pile on to this comment excessively, because this applies equally well to many others, but posts like this were what really turned me into an HBD guy. You present a fully general argument against population level genetic differences in literally anything, apparently without noticing that there are plenty of such differences that are completely uncontroversial.

our most common ancestor is very recent

People often mean very different things when they say "most common ancestor".

Do you mean the person such that every single person living today has as an ancestor somewhere in their family tree? This person is a mere 3,000 years ago: http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureAncestorsPressRelease.html

Do you mean the time from which every person living back then was an ancestor to everyone living today. That's about 7,000 years as you mentioned.

Do you mean the person from which a certain locus in all modern living humans descends from? This person is about 50,000 years ago (this is highly dependent on the locus though)

Do you mean the person from which all of a large block of the DNA of all living people comes from? This person is about 300,000 years ago (see e.g. Y-chromosomal Adam, the guy who all modern extant Y-chromosomes are descended from) and isn't even an anatomically modern human.

Do you mean the person from which all of our DNA is descended from? This organism is many many millions of years old and isn't even human.

The first two cases really don't mean much when looking at modern humans. For instance you could have gotten a fragment of Chromosome 1 from this person while I got a fragment of Chromosome 17 from this person (if we even got any DNA from him in the first place, which in itself is pretty unlikely), and it's perfectly possible that people living in East Asia preferentially got Chromosme 1 fragments from him while people in Europe got Chromosome 17 fragments from him (because his descendeds which moved to those locations carried those specific parts of his genome there).

Same with the second case, just because every human being at that point was both our's ancestors doesn't mean anything about what proportion of those ancestors we have and these proportions can be very different, from Wikipedia:

This is illustrated in the 2003 simulation as follows: considering the ancestral populations alive at 5000 BC, close to the ACA point, a modern-day Japanese person will get 88.4% of their ancestry from Japan, and most of the remainder from China or Korea, with only 0.00049% traced to Norway; conversely, a modern-day Norwegian will get over 92% of their ancestry from Norway (or over 96% from Scandinavia) and only 0.00044% from Japan.

Thus, even though the Norwegian and Japanese person share the same set of ancestors, these ancestors appear in their family tree in dramatically different proportions. A Japanese person in 5000 BC with present-day descendants will likely appear trillions of times in a modern-day Japanese person's family tree, but might appear only one time in a Norwegian person's family tree. A 5000 BC Norwegian person will similarly appear far more times in a typical Norwegian person's family tree than they will appear in a Japanese person's family tree.

It's the third and further things which matter for how much genetic variance there is between two groups, becuase at that point you can directly point to specific portions of the genome and say that for both of us that ancestor provided the DNA at this location.

Those numbers are way too low.

The 3000, if you read the link you put, is using a way oversimplified model.

The 7000 is clearly false given the separation of the Americas long before that, and very low rates of admixture since aside from the last 500 years.

You don't actually need to have any DNA from any specific people generations back in your ancestry, the recombination could and often does go the wrong way.

Your overall point is good, though, that things go far enough back to matter, and that mere common ancestry doesn't mean an enormous amount.

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