Blunicorn
29d ago
I have a meta question about the study of group differences and don't know anywhere else to ask it.
If the claim "group A is on average different to group B on X measure" receives the response "But that difference actually disappears when you control for C variable, so the cause of the difference is not inherent, it must be C that causes it"
If controlling for something causes the average difference to disappear, would this not simply be selecting for individuals within both groups who have similar genes which cause them to be more similar? This seems like you're not not comparing the entirety of group A to the entirety of group B, but you're just comparing a subgroup of group A to a subgroup of group B - when the original claim was that the entire groups differ in the average. This seems like a fallacy.
Blunicorn
2mo ago
The results of the study revealed that children who were living in poverty and whose parents lacked nurturing skills were likely to have less gray and white matter in their brains. The researchers say that white matter is usually linked to the brain’s ability to transmit signals between cells and structures, while gray matter is associated with intelligence. The MRI scans also revealed that poor children had two key brain structures that were smaller, compared with wealthier children. These were the amygdala – a structure linked to emotional health – and the hippocampus – an area of the brain linked to memory and learning. Furthermore, it was found that children in poverty were more likely to experience stressful life events, such as moving house or schools, which can have an impact on brain development.
This is just a typical study pushed by "pro-nurture" people who want to assume that correlation=causation and don't think to control for any genetic confounding (poverty causes low IQ rather than parents' genes that cause low IQ causes poverty). Hardly some kind of slamdunk on anti-HBD people.
IQ and socioeconomic status is what I had in mind
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