tailcalled
1yr ago
I just created an account on The Motte to PM someone a question, and afterwards I started browsing through some links and found this post in the vault: Belief Against an Intelligence Gap / Why the Woke Won't Argue: A look at Turkheimer and HBD research.
Now, a year ago or so, I would probably have strongly agreed with this post. But recently, I've come to a totally different conclusion: HBDers tend to totally refuse to engage with basic principles of the debate. I say that as an HBDer who has started interacting with other HBDers, and correcting when they make mistakes. Two core examples I have in mind:
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Heritability simply does not mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean - because of the phenotypic null hypothesis. You often see HBDers declare success when yet another twin study shows that yet another variable is highly heritable, or that there is a genetic correlation between two variables which are usually suggested to be causally linked to each other. In the latter case, I often see HBDers act as if the genetic correlation proves that there is genetic confounding between the two variables, which is a ridiculous suggestion if you think through the actual math. It's perfectly reasonable to say that the debate struggles with progressing because anti-HBDers aren't properly engaging with HBDers, but it would be a lie to also pretend that HBDers aren't also guilty of lack of thought and engagement.
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HBDers often signal-boost nonserious or dishonest studies. My go-to example of this is this study on effort and IQ, which claimed to find that effort does not matter for IQ scores. This obviously massively contradicts common sense, and indeed when I took a quick look at the study, its data actually totally supported the notion that effort matters for IQ, and it's merely that the researcher (who is a well-respected leading IQ researcher!) analyzed it wrong (see my analysis in the thread, or perform the analysis for yourself). The researcher still has not changed his mind on the flaws of it, and I regularly see the study pop up on my timeline. If HBDers are going to boost these kinds of studies and ignore critique of them, then why should anyone listen to HBDers?
So, what view would I suggest? A far more symmetric view: Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality. Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the unachievability of equality and justification of inequality. 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
Regarding the gender gap in math ability, has any country tried to just make girls take twice as many math classes as boys do for a generation to see if that would reverse it?
tailcalled
1yr ago
I appreciate you trying to bring nuance to the conversation, but without some examples it's still not clear to me what sorts of things you disagree with HBDers about exactly.
I gave an example? The linked study? It's absolutely absurd methodology for testing the stated research question.
I think the most relevant question is the extent to which the gaps in intellectual achievement, employment in various professions, and crime rates could realistically be changed by policy interventions.
There are many possible questions one can come up with, and this is one of them, but it's not the one I'm making the threads about.
I'm making the threads about the phenotypic null hypothesis, which is a critical question for how to interpret various other kinds of evidence like twin studies.
As far as I can tell, you're saying that heritable traits might be caused along the way by others treating people differently based on their phenotype, and if that differential treatment were to go away, the presumably so would the heritability. Is that a fair summary?
Yes that is part of it, for instance if you are smart due to genetics then people will give you more education credentials and more money, and if instead people gave everyone a random amount of money, the heritability of income would disappear.
However it doesn't technically speaking have to be others treatment. It might also be your own treatment, or a result of other things like disease or physics or lots of things. Basically, variables affect each other across different levels, and that prevents heritability from distinguishing biological from nonbiological levels.
And as an aside, I find the name "phenotypic null hypothesis" to be a bad name for two reasons: 1) It's not descriptive, and 2) it seems to be playing a rhetorical game by calling itself the "null hypothesis". I prefer to discuss evidence for and against various claims rather than arguing about who has the burden of proof.
I think it has a good reason to call itself the null hypothesis. It would be absurd to claim that the heritability of income or marriage was not due to the way other people treat you phenotypically. You can't have a serious debate about HBD without the phenotypic null hypothesis being properly understood.
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'm not talking about how things morally ought to be, I'm trying to figure out how the world is actually like. For the purpose of e.g. doing evolutionary psychology, such as with the linked study, it is relevant to know that heritability is of no evidentiary value.
tailcalled
1yr ago
You did not respond to that allegation. Why should we waste time sorting through the pilpul of a confessed propagandist if we are in any way interested in epistemics, as you purport to be?
I am not aware of any epistemic rules which say that you can't use moral judgements to decide whether something is silly or ugly.
Let me also cut through what feels like a lot of unnecessary argumentation and simply ask you this: how can you explain the correlation between cognitive skills and genetic closeness depicted in this figure without acknowledging substantial genetic heritability? How is any sort of null hypothesis even necessary with this kind of direct evidence in hand?
I agree that they are heritable. Turkheimer also agrees that they are heritable.
tailcalled
1yr ago
That's a rather lazy strawman. Whenever this comes up here, people say that their primary motivation is to show that the progressive argument "outcome disparities, therefore discrimination, therefore reverse discrimination is necessary" does not hold and leads to unfair treatment. You can very much come at it from an egalitarian point of view.
I'm basing my experience more on the Twitter debates that hover around Erik Turkheimer than I am on the discussions that happen on The Motte, as I don't have much experience with The Motte. It's quite possible that The Motte is different.
You lost me here. Could you elaborate for the innumerate?
I think if you're innumerate you should just not rely on quantitative studies such as twin studies because they require numeracy to interpret.
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
What is "human neural uniformity"?
I didn't interpret Turkheimer as judging it ugly rather than true on moral grounds, I interpreted him as judging it ugly rather than silly or unobjectionable on moral grounds.
tailcalled
1yr ago
I mean I can try, but I already wrote an explanation in my blog post, so I'm not sure how much more I can say about it. Is there some specific part of my linked post that you find confusing?
tailcalled
1yr ago
Dude, read a few twin studies, they find that pretty much everything is heritable, of course heritability is of no evidentiary value.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Phenotypic null hypothesis isn't an obscure methodological limitation, it is a fundamental property of concepts like "heritability" and "genetic correlation" which can easily be derived in simulation studies. If you don't understand how it works then you shouldn't use concepts like heritability and genetic correlation at all in the first place.
tailcalled
1yr ago
I've seen HBDers point out that there is a genetic correlation between homosexuality and mental illness, and use this as an argument that homosexuality and mental illness are innately related, as a counterargument against e.g. homosexuals being bullied and becoming mentally ill as a result of that. (I've also seen lots of other examples, but this was one of the key examples that made me decide to write the post.)
If a genetic correlation referred to a genetic confounding aka horizontal pleiotropy aka "one gene has two unrelated effects", then that counterargument would make sense. The bullying theory of gay mental illness doesn't predict that there is a biological connection between homosexuality and mental illness.
However, genetic correlation actually refers to something more subtle. Two variables are genetically correlated if genetic factors that contribute to one variable also contribute to the other variable. So for instance, intelligence and education are genetically correlated, because genes that contribute intelligence makes people better able to pass exams etc., which unlocks better educational opportunities. In this case, intelligence and education are not genetically confounded; rather they are just ordinarily causally related, and this makes them genetically correlated, just as it makes them ordinarily correlated.
tailcalled
1yr ago
I have already read his point about the phenotypic null hypothesis, so your argument can't exactly persuade me to un-read it, whatever that would mean. And having read it, I've come to the conclusion that it's a critically important point for understanding heritability. Reading his paper and understanding his argument screens off whichever virtue or vice he might have.
tailcalled
1yr ago
I mean, they obviously don't, see, e.g., grip strength.
Just for reference, do you have data on sex differences in grip strength not correlating with gender equality?
As for the gender equality paradox, that is, that there is less interest in STEM among women in countries that score higher on a variety of gender equality, indices, the correlation is negative.
I realize the correlation is negative and don't see how that's a relevant response to my point about names.
Well, given that a whole host of environmental interventions targetting the mimicking effect that we tried for decades seem to have had - at best - virtually no effect, chances are that these proposed environmental causes don't explain the whole picture, or even large part of it.
Have code camps actually changed girls' perceptions of whether men or women are more likely to end up as programmers? If not, then even if the mimicry hypothesis is true, you wouldn't expect it to change their behavior, and therefore the failure of the intervention is of no evidentiary value for the validity of the mimicry hypothesis.
It seems to me you have created a completely generalisable dismissal against virtually all arguments proposing a biological cause, given that you seem to treat the failure of environmental interventions as a knock against biological explanations. I am not even sure what you are saying here?
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I don't think I said that failure of environmental interventions is a knock against biological explanations. I just questioned whether the relevant environmental interventions had been tried.
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
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.
tailcalled
1yr ago
I agree that either both CRT and HBD should be permissible to discuss, or neither should be, with the current situation being unjust against HBD. I used to lean towards "both", wanting the free market of ideas to sort it out. However, the free market of ideas doesn't seem to work, as evidenced by lots of things including HBDers not understanding the phenotypic null hypothesis, so now I don't know what to think anymore.
tailcalled
1yr ago
AFAIK the mainstream hypothesis among child developmental psychologists is a self-socialization theory, where children mimic adults in their culture. The whole patriarchy thing is more of a feminist activist thing that doesn't necessarily generalize to the expert's views. Of course the experts might be wrong too, but I'm just saying, as far as I know nobody has tried whether raising children in a culture where math and technical subjects is more of a women's thing works.
First -- your writing style doesn't work well for me. It's too abstract, and you don't clearly state your point. For example, your point #1 "Heritability simply does not mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean - because of the phenotypic null hypothesis." What is your point here? What do you think "HBDs want it to mean"? What is the "phenotypic null hypothesis"? It's not good writing to make me chase down you thoughts, especially on other sites, especially before you've proven you're worth the work. I went to that site, and am not much more enlightened. You seem to somewhere make the point "Things influenced by genes often go though non-biological channels". Or maybe "things that look inherited aren't always". Sure, I'd say both are fairly non-controversial. A classic example of the second is, e.g. "speaking French" which looks inherited on the surface, but is clearly not biological. And yes, our environment and society mediate all kinds of things, we live in a complex interconnected world.
Do you have more of a point? I couldn't really tell (of course, that can be on me, but ... I've read and understood a fair number of others on this topic, but not your writing...) I really don't know what your code and diagrams at the end are supposed to show. Summarize your cool conclusion! E.g. "Even though X is not directly responsible, in a naive analysis it looks like it is, exactly like QQQ, which actually is directly responsible. Here's how that can play out ...". I think you're saying something like that, but you don't bother actually saying it (or I missed it).
Here are some examples of places where I'd bring it up on twitter:
The post comes from frustration with these sorts of situations. Importantly, it's not the specific interactions but instead that they are repeated and that often not much update happens. This seems like a point that should get signal-boosted more in a healthy community.
In any case you sort of seem to be saying "we can't figure anything out" which both seems wrong, and kind of useless. Do you apply this to all such studies? Maybe we should -- I admit, I tend to write off almost of all psychological and sociological studies these days, because they seem so ideologically captured. On the other hand, between statistics, twin studies (and separated twin studies), and sibling studies, we seem to be able to do a pretty good job on some things.
Yes, frequently scroll through my twitter and just fire of random quick tweets that debunk random social science studies. And I don't trust any social science studies until I've checked the methodology myself.
Second -- you seem to be coming at this from a place of significant bias. "Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes," is an incredibly weak straw-man, it's basically "Everyone I disagree with is a racist". Is that really the best you can do, in terms of extending charity to the people you disagree with? I personally, like most of the others here, see the acknowledgement of group differences (and for what it's worth, I don't really care much if it's culture or biology, and both seem taboo anyway) as primarily an alternative for differing outcomes, without discrimination being the ONLY explanation.
I'm in tech. There aren't many women, nor many black people. This is ascribed to sexism and racism, which doesn't match what I've seen, experienced, or heard from the affected people (from women at least; I haven't asked many black colleagues about racism). I see my company following policy to massively privilege both groups, and to blame white cis-men for all the problems, and those both seem wrong, and even damaging to me (and to a number of people in the targeted groups, e.g. women who just want to be SWEs, and not feel they got their role because of their sex, and no, I'm not concern trolling, the suspicion around the privileging is real). I see differing interests (and maybe ability at the margins) and degrees as the main reasons for the differing representation, but we're not allowed to notice that, as "It's not the pipeline". James Damore got fired for trying to make this point.
You also see this censorship of blasphemy in the US, especially around crime, where apparently pointing out some choice statistics around violent crime is considered a hate crime. (Again, FWIW, I'd consider those stats more a cultural issue, but it's a pretty important one, upstream of the 'getting shot by police' issue).
So anyway, what I'd like from you, and I think would benefit you, is to tighten up your writing -- make your point first, then provide an explanation of it (it's a classic academic / systemic thinker error to do it the other way around). Make things more concrete. Work from a specific example and tie your points back to it. People are reluctant to trust generic models, as they are often used to lie (see Abigail Thompson's dissection of Hong-Page's "mathematical proof that diversity trumps ability". There's a nice discussion of it here
Also, try to be more charitable to your outgroup.
You're making assumptions about my ingroups/outgroups that aren't necessarily true. E.g. I've spent tons of money on HBD-aligned research, partly for motivations similar to what you describe here.
No, this doesn't "obviously massively contradict" my common sense, and I think many would disagree. In fact, I thought one of the main points of IQ tests, rather than "effort tests", is that neither effort nor prep makes much of a difference to them. Otherwise, for example, they wouldn't stay very stable over time (which I understand they do).
I was under the impression that the test-retest reliability of IQ tests is 0.85? If we assume that the test-retest reliability of effort is 50% (I suspect it's higher, but let's be generous to your side), and we go by the estimate that 8% of variance in IQ is down to effort, then that would mean that effort would introduce an unreliability of 50%*8%=4% to IQ tests. This is considerably less than the 15% unreliability that I've commonly seen, so I don't see how your argument is even halfway close to working out here.
Prep courses would also have more value, which I don't think do. Do you think when people can't make intellectual leaps others do, they just aren't trying hard enough in that particular moment?
Isn't the item level of IQ tests (which seems like the closest analogy to intellectual leaps to me) dominated by noise? So I'd say noise, not g or effort.
Also even if we ignore the item noise point, by the numbers I'm giving, test effort would only be 8% of the explanation for test underperformance.
I think most would agree effort plays some role -- if I don't care or try at all on an IQ tests, and answer at random, I'll have a low score. If I try to be fast and disciplined, and use all my test-taking savvy, I'll probably (?) do better than if I just breeze through (although I wonder). But basically, once you're trying to do well, it's not really clear what "trying harder" even means on IQ test. It's not like pushing on a bar (and honestly, even for that the range where trying, vs training and genes and drugs, makes a difference, is pretty small in that moment. If I can barely do one pull-up, trying really hard might mean I do one, or two, but I'm generally not going to be able to do 10). So anyway, stop claiming consensus on things people will disagree on (especially things where your "consensus" seems to go against standard definitions).
It sounds to me that you are granting the basic point (effort plays some role), but then acting like you are disagreeing anyway? Is it a quantitative disagreement? If so, what is your estimate for the quantitative effect that effort plays?
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.
tailcalled
1yr ago
It totally does fit as an example, one just has to be careful what it is an example of.
tailcalled
1yr ago
Well so here are two models:
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People start with meritocracy as a value and then try to figure out the factual questions about how abilities work.
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People start with some policy opinions or alliances or something and then work to rationalize those.
Model 1 is debunked because if people were trying to figure out the factual questions, they would take basic concepts like the phenotypic null hypothesis into account, and they would be upset about having signal-boosted terrible studies like the IQ/effort one. It's possible that there is some alternative to model 2 that people follow, in which case you should feel encouraged to share what that alternative is.
A few days ago, I made a comment defending Turkheimer and critizing HBDers, in response to a vaulted "best of" comment dismissing Turkheimer. One of the main things my comment centered on was the phenotypic null hypothesis, which can roughly speaking be summarized as "correlation does not imply confounding" + "causation does not imply unmediated and unmoderated causation". Or as I phrased it:
The consensus claimed that this was well-understood by HBDers around here, and perhaps even by HBDers more generally. Now I don't know that I buy that because it really doesn't seem well-understood in many places other than with people around Turkheimer.
In the thread, one person ended up posting an example of a paper which supposedly understood the nuances I was talking about. However, I disagree with that, and think that it is instead an excellent example of the problems with HBD epistemics. For instance, the paper opens by saying that the goal is to test evolutionary psychology hypotheses by testing for heritability in some personality traits:
Now, if you don't appreciate the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this would probably seem like a reasonable or even excellent idea. Evolution is about how genes are selected based on the traits they produce; if something is genetically coded, then evolution must have produced it, and conversely if evolution has produced it then it must be genetic.
But if you appreciate the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this study is of minimal relevance, almost no evidentiary value, and perhaps even eye-rollingly stupid. Of course the scales you administer are going to be heritable, because pretty much everything is heritable. Heritability doesn't mean that you've got anything meaningfully biological.
Now the thing is, my impression is that behavior geneticists do this sort of nonsense all the time, and that HBDers take them seriously when they do it. If HBDers instead properly appreciated the phenotypic null hypothesis, they would look somewhere else for this sort of info, or maybe even fix behavior genetics by propagating the info backwards to HBD-sympathetic behavior geneticists that they should read more Turkheimer. Notably, since this study was suggested as exemplary by someone here on TheMotte, it seems to provide at least an existence proof of someone who does not have a proper understanding of the phenotypic null hypothesis.
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