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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   26578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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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.

I think this paper is what you are looking for.

Sociologist's fallacy

Can you give us an example of this? I am curious to dig into a simulation where controls are impossible.

IQ and socioeconomic status is what I had in mind

E.g. USA blacks and whites have same IQs after you "control" jointly for individual's income, education, marital status (and other factors which are downstream of IQs)

or, jokingly, controlling for lattitidue, Texas and Alaska have same climate.

Those seem like backronyms rather than inseparable conditions with no directional causation.

what do you mean?

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