tailcalled
1yr ago
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).
tailcalled
1yr ago
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.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Do you sincerely believe that the sex differences in grip strength are to a meaningful degree affected by social attitudes towards gender equality?
No, but I saw other physical sex differences, I think it was waist-to-hip ratio, which correlated with gender identity. I don't know why they correlate, but y'know, generalized phenotypic null hypothesis. Whatever causes sex difference in WHR to increase could plausibly also cause sex differences in grip strength to increase.
To begin with: because for most would-be listeners, supporting the opposite camp equals approval of one's family and one's people getting discriminated against (the nigh-inevitable alternative to HBD being acceptance of unredeemed racial guilt). Some are turned off by this; others are quite happy.
I think the honest way of addressing this is "fuck your anti-white racism", not coming up with elaborate justifications that were never epistemically serious to begin with.
HBD/Blank Slate is a political question more than it's a scientific one, a question of whether a civic religion founded on this stated promise of equal innate potential (or at least absence of substantial between-group differences) is needed for the prosperity of a polity and reduction in individual suffering; it's a question of oughts. Turkheimer et al. wear their oughts on their sleeves, adversarially, so it's a bit of a double standard to dunk on HBDers for failing or refusing to understand a peripheral aspect of «is».
This sounds like a scientific metapolitical question as much as it sounds like a political one. See the end of this book review for more discussion.
I have read a decent amount of your writing on the topic today, debate and adjacent content; the more I was reading, the stronger was the feeling that this'll be a fruitless debate. Your writing over the last year displays a trend towards isolated demands for rigor against HBD outlook (for unknown reasons that I assume, for now, are self-preservation and career strategy, a la Abdel The Backstabber, but might be just autistic perfectionism and purity spiraling; take your pick at which is less charitable).
I don't think I have an isolated demand for rigor towards HBD. In other places than the linked ones I regularly challenge anti-HBD. The issue is that neither side wants to be rigorous aka both sides just want to make things up with studies that support their general vibe without checking whether those studies are actually of any evidentiary value.
Now to be clear, the faults of HBDers are not big. [...] Your two examples aren't damning.
Your thread on effort and application of instrumental variables seems to sidestep the problem of scores influencing perception of effort, and anyway it doesn't affect the debate in absence of good evidence for differences in incentives&effort
If scores influence perception of effort, then it would lead to a downwards bias in the estimated effect, not an upwards bias. Also it is not really mathematically plausible that the direction of causality is reversed because that would require an effect size of around 2, whereas unless there are shenanigans going on they should only go up to 1.
And yes I agree that it would be ridiculous to say that the racial differences in IQ are due to differences in effort. The effect of effort is fairly small, so you would need a humongous difference in effort to cause it. The problem is that HBDers do not separate this question from the question of whether effort affects IQ scores, and so they say stupid things like that effort doesn't matter for IQ in order to protect the notion of race differences, when really the obvious answer should be "yes, effort matters but it doesn't explain race differences".
(and, well, whatever happens with low-stakes online IQ testing, people try «as hard as they can» in contexts relevant for long-term life outcomes or even on serious IQ tests).
I don't believe that. I often didn't try as hard as I physically could on exams. For instance once I was done with exams I might leave earlier if allowed instead of checking over my answers for errors, where of course if I had checked over my answers I would inevitably have found some errors and thereby increased my scores. I also never really prepared for exams ahead of time.
Now to be clear, the faults of HBDers are not big. [...] Your two examples aren't damning.
Your triumphant post on the environmental null hypothesis is… inconclusive, since it doesn't bother comparing models following from theories on their predictive merits (and also other twins and pedigree schemes). You can't just «call» ENH like you so often do on Twitter, and certainly can't just assume that nobody accounts for measurement error, that all causal effects will generate genetic correlations, and thus that the usual HBDer touting of gen correlations/gen confounding is invalid.
First, it's phenotypic null hypothesis, not environmental null hypothesis, i.e. if someone is smarter due to having a bigger brain and this bigger brain makes them do better in exams and therefore get more education, then that would be weird to call "environmental"
Secondly, while I can't assume that nobody accounts for measurement error, I can assume that the overwhelming proportion of studies don't account for measurement error, because I've seen that they don't. For an example in the case of personality, see how this shows almost all twin studies on the heritability of personality to be wrong: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/02/getting-personality-right/
And I can totally assume that causal effects between individual difference variables generate genetic correlations between them (as long as they are heritable, but remember, everything is heritable). I gave you the theory and a simulation for why; if you disagree then show me a hypothetical counterexample where there is a causal effect but no induced genetic correlation. This is where I really consider it a big, damning fault, because this is really basic stuff.
A failure to understand the phenotypic null hypothesis is the same tier of error as an environmentalist who assumes that any difference in outcomes must prove that there is racial discrimination. No! Racial differences in abilities also predict racial differences in outcomes. Similarly, nonbiologically mediated/moderated causation predicts heritability and genetic correlations too, not as any sort of bias or measurement error or anything, but simply from the definition of what heritability is. If you don't accept this then you are not seriously engaging in the debate and no better than the environmentalists.
Now it's perfectly reasonable to raise questions about genetic confounding. It's just idiotic/dishonest/??? to say that genetic correlations prove genetic confounding.
Take any actually published model emphasizing environment (i.e. an X factor creating race differences – I mean, okay, the gay-bullying-mental illness stuff at least proposes a half-legible causal pathway), and subject it to scrutiny next to a genetics-first one – most likely, it'll fall apart first.
I am not bringing up the phenotypic null hypothesis as being a debunking of the HBD view on racial differences in intelligence. I agree that it doesn't debunk the HBD view on racial differences in intelligence.
I am bringing it up as a basic fact about heritability how heritability works that HBDers fail to understand/fail to engage with.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Disagreements where Aumann's agreement theorem's assumptions are satisfied rapidly disappear, so whenever you talk about persistent controversies, they will not be satisfied. However, it is still relevant for me to know whether they fail to be satisfied because one side if obstinate, or because both sides are bad, as if it's only one side that's bad then I can just copy my views from the other side.
tailcalled
1yr ago
🤷 I also want to know the truth; what triggered this discussion was mainly that the other post had been placed in the best-of section of this website. Take it up with the moderators if you think the conduct of each side is irrelevant.
Though I don't think the conduct is irrelevant, because of Aumann's agreement theorem. If there was a side that conducted itself well, you could just copy your opinion from what they say. Because they're not behaving well, you can't do that. That seems like important information to know.
Also I wouldn't say I don't have any space for people who want to know the truth:
There's some honest people on either side who have been swept up in the drama, but in terms of the direction of the energy which drives the whole debate, this is what lies underneath it.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Not understanding the phenotypic null hypothesis is not a mere "bias in favor of their pre-existing beliefs". It's a fundamental failure to comprehend what is even being talked about. A failure to understand/accept it is just as bad as if a leftist considers inequality of outcome to be a proof of racism, and claims that inequality of outcome disproves genetic explanations.
tailcalled
1yr ago
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.
tailcalled
1yr ago
One productive step you could take if you want people to engage with the argument is to do the work of simplifying the argument to the point where it doesn't take significant investment to understand it. Boil it down to a couple of sentences with a simple toy model, and explain how it analogizes back to the original claim. But your whole method of repeatedly posting to the front page "here's a link to a paper from a confessed liar, go do a ton of homework to understand it if you want to consider yourself rational" is just one iteration of a gish gallop.
What's wrong with the toy model I gave in my article, of education? That genes affect intelligence which affect exam completion which affect education?
tailcalled
1yr ago
Particularly relevant to HBD, my understanding is that you might say that blacks scoring lower on tests might be shown to be heritable, but perhaps that could be because of racism. Since blackness is also genetically heritable, if blackness were to cause them to experience racism which causes their test scores to be lower, then this would be a plausible explanation for why low test scores appear to be genetically heritable in blacks, but it would actually be due to blackness being genetically inherited and that causing low test scores through a more indirect means than low intelligence.
Yes, that would be one potential example (though I don't expect this to be the true answer because it has been studied by e.g. looking for whether skin color is a mediator, though I'm currently trying to commission a different study which looks at it from a different angle).
However the phenotypic null hypothesis of course applies to tons and tons of behavior genetics, not just within race stuff but also lots of other places. And HBDers often discuss other behavior genetic studies without properly appreciating the phenotypic null hypothesis.
I think people are perhaps responding to you defensively because this feels like an isolated demand for rigor or weakmanning directed specifically at HBD, without considering the epistemic failings of hardline blank-slatists which are surely even greater.
I mean I've definitely called out people on both sides for nonsense. I even tend to hang out in Turkheimer's mentions and critique him. So I don't think I'm doing isolated demands for rigor, I think I'm doing widespread demands for rigor.
Also I think that showing a trait to be heritable has to count as weak Bayesian evidence at least in favor of a genetic explanation.
The prior probability that a variable is heritable is really really high. Meanwhile, Bayesian updating depends on the probability of the evidence being low, as otherwise it doesn't change your priors much.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Sorry, didn't check your Twitter, as I'm not on it, and don't like it (and don't like following links just to know what someone's talking about; I do like them for references).
I think it would be best to read what people are saying before responding to them.
I guess if you stated clearly what you think contributes to IQ scores then perhaps we'd mostly agree. [...] What I read from your initial post is that effort was more important than everything else, which seemed clearly wrong. You gave this impression by not specifying how much effect you thought that it had, and by saying people claiming it didn't have an effect "obviously massively contradicts common sense," which is a very strong formulation.
Sorry, the point about how it "obviously massively contradicts common sense" was not meant to be interpreted as a measure of effect size, it was meant to be interpreted literally: as an expression that if I went out and told people that IQ tests don't depend on effort (as HBDers wpuld have me do), then people would conclude that I am delusionally worshipping IQ tests - and as I showed in the thread, it appears that they wpuld be right to conclude that.
That still seems quite a bit too high to me, and I don't really see how you clearly quantify 'effort'
🤷♀️ I just went with whatever quantification chosen by the leading IQ researcher whose study got signal-boosted. It's quite possible it's bad as I didn't look into it in detail, but if it is bad then I feel like that also reflects badly on HBDers for signal-boosting a study that uses a bad measure.
sorry, to me 8% really seems too high, I'd think how well I slept, the questions I got, my mood, time of day, my pencil, and a bunch of other things would play a larger role than nebulous 'effort'
Those might be correlated with effort. Mood in particular seems likely mediated by effort.
I don't really agree that effort is particularly nebulous of a concept. Have you never had the experience of just quickly marking down your first thoughts without wanting to bother thinking them through and not double-checking that they are right?
If that's not what you're implying, what is your point in bringing up effort?
My point in bringing up effort is that I was scrolling through my twitter timeline that is filled with social science, and then I saw all the HBDers I followed praising this guy for debunking the notion that IQ is affected by effort. And then I thought, hm, that sounds implausible, I should double-check the statistics, and it turned out the statistics were wrong and actually effort is affected by IQ.
I don't want to replace leftists lying to me about racial difference in g in order to rationalize racial equality with rightists lying to me about effort in IQ tests in order to rationalize racial inequality. I don't think I need special justification for wanting to know the truth about each question in a decoupled way from everything else. But if we absolutely should justify it by practical means, then a straightforward justification would be that this directly contradicts people's experience when filling out tests, and therefore looks delusional to insist on, presumably on the margin reducing the number of people sympathetic to HBD.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Hm, that seems interesting but unfalsifiable. Even if parents try to pretend really hard that everyone is living in such a culture, can't you always say that the children are picking up on their deep-seated true social beliefs?
For just about any hypothesis, you can of course cook up versions that are unfalsifiable, but I don't think the basic version of the hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Of course direct interventions would be way expensive; but the child psychologists have various experiments they claim supports it that I don't think I've seen a strong HBD response to. (Not to say that I agree with the environmentalists here, I am currently agnostic I think.)
tailcalled
1yr ago
Yes, this is called environmental correlations, it is correct that the phenotypic null hypothesis also predicts the environmental correlation to be high whereas the genetic confounding hypothesis doesn't predict that. (Specifically, the phenotypic null hypothesis predicts every variance component to be correlated, whereas confounding hypotheses only predicts confounded variance components to be correlated.)
Some of the studies on homosexuality and mental illness finds the environmental correlation to be zero, which supports the genetic confounding view. I have at times acknowledged that/pointed that out. I also address the concept in my linked post.
The thing that bothers me is not the conclusion but instead the argument: WHY would HBDers make the argument with genetic correlations in the first place, when clearly it is the environmental correlations that are the key question? Because they don't know the phenotypic null hypothesis. But WHY would HBDers not know the phenotypic null hypothesis when it is such a basic concept for heritability? Because the phenotypic null hypothesis is anmoying and sounds like an outgroup thing, is my hypothesis.
tailcalled
1yr ago
This is mostly it, with one major point:
What about "genetically correlated"? We know tall people are better at basketball - the variables are correlated - but is this effect genetic, or environmental? Did tall people inherit their basketball skill directly, or was it just an effect of their height? If you get leg-extension surgery, do you get better at basketball?
If the basketball skill is an effect of height, then height and basketball skill will be genetically correlated. (For basically the same reason that if basketball skill is an effect of height, then basketball skill and height will be ordinarily correlated.) Not "will be misestimated to be genetically correlated when they are actually environmentally correlated" - but instead "will genuinely be genetically correlated". This is because genetic correlation is not a measure of whether height is horizontally pleiotropic with good slam-dunk technique, but instead just a measure of whether height genes and basketball genes are overlapping, for whatever reason it might be.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Given how high stakes the LSATs and SATs are, who doesn't put maximal effort?
Neither I nor the person who did the study were making a claim about the SAT, we were considering a setting where people fill out surveys for pay on the internet.
Yet some people get way higher LSAT scores than others even though everyone is trying hard, suggesting innate differences still matter even if incentives also matter. Probably 100k+ people annually apply to top law & med schools, top colleges; I am sure most of them are putting in maximum effort on high-stakes tests such as the LSAT, GRE, ACT, SAT, MCAT, etc.
I didn't say effort was the determining factor, I said that it mattered, with natural variation in effort covering maybe slightly less than 10% of the variance (so if you go from slacking to max effort, maybe that gets you a bit more than a standard deviation of score).
Part of the problem with a lot of HBD-dunking, such as by Taleb, is they fail to control for individual preferences. So in aggregate, correlations between innate qualities and outcomes are low, but you are not accounting for individual preferences, not that genes do not matter.
Much of individual preferences are heritable too, but yes I agree that group-level differences are much less "noisy" than individual-level differences.
tailcalled
1yr ago
What's wrong with "HBD proponents think heritable T is mraningful evidence for evopsych on T, even though it's not"?
tailcalled
1yr ago
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.
tailcalled
1yr ago
The phrase "phenotypic null hypothesis" captures a point that is critically important to understand in these sorts of discussions. It can definitely be misused, shouting "phenotypic null hypothesis" is definitely necessary in contexts where people aren't taking it into account. If there are any of my tweets where you feel like I've abused it then feel free to point at them.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Yes, but that probably says something about female interest in STEM, which is probably somewhat correlated with aptitude. You could of course argue that this, too, is caused by an all-pervasive patriarchy, but given that the presence of such programs in a society has a negative correlation with female interest in STEM (i.e. the so-called "gender equality paradox"), I find that harder and harder to believe.
AFAIK just about all sex difference correlate with gender equality, including obviously-societal ones such as gender differences in names:
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1432940616653152259
(And of course it's been shown to apply to e.g. gender stereotypes too, though that could very well be due to stereotype accuracy.)
I don't know why they correlate like this, but I feel like this gives you something equivalent to the phenotypic null hypothesis for the gender equality paradox: if the paradox applies to some variable X, and X is causally upstream of some variable Y, then a priori you'd expect the paradox in X to create a paradox in Y.
There are more people with an interest in, and a knack for, STEM to be found within the male than within the female population. Given that environmental interventions have rather spectactularly failed to reverse course in this regard, Occam's razor would suggest that biology plays a factor here.
The thing is, as kids, boys will look at what men do and mimic that, whereas girls will look at what women do and mimic that. I don't know whether it is the sex difference in programming etc. that is biological, or if it is the sex difference in mimicry that is biological. I wouldn't expect it to be both, because what would that lead to if you took all the world's female programmers and male elementary school teachers and had them create a society where they raised a generation of ordinary children? Would the boys in this society do programming (and thus be mimicking women), or mimic men (and thus do teaching)?
Since I don't know the answer to this question, I can't tell if the sex difference in programming is innate or not.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Don't most girls not participate in such programs? You can only really expect to have an effect on the ones who participate, so if most don't participate, you are closer to not having the program at all than you are to having it for all the girls.
tailcalled
1yr ago
I don't buy that his arguments have only a coincidental corration to truth. He is biased, yes, but there is also an important signal.
tailcalled
1yr ago
I don't think the phenotypic null hypothesis is directly applicable to racial differences because we have a lot of specific evidence on race and IQ that makes it not a general thing. Rather, it has effects on what sorts of arguments are relevant for race and IQ.
Also what evidence would raise your priors of a trait being genetic not merely heritable, other than finding the {X-gene} ?
Correlation with anatomy, especially directly relevant anatomy (IQ correlates with brain size).
Being consistently expressed regardless of context.
Having a clear evolutionary/theoretical reason to expect being biological.
tailcalled
1yr ago
I'm not saying I'm disagreeing with the core HBD conclusion. I'm saying HBDers ought to have a sufficiently good understanding of the phenotypic null hypothesis that they roll their eyes at studies claiming to find evidence for evopsych by finding traits to be heritable.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Maybe the cause of the differences is on an environmental factor that is hard to intervene on.
But human neural uniformity sounds like a dumb and baseless theory.
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