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Hi again. You may not know it, but the author of the text in the vault, JB, is a bit of a meme here, an avatar of pig-headed intransigence and hubris, which lends credence to your words. Nevertheless, I can't see how your arguments justify disagreeing with him on this issue and indeed coming to a «totally different conclusion».
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.
And because whatever the faults of HBDers, the other side remains epistemologically worse. Turkheimer may have some legitimate scientific argument against between-group genetic diffs on g; his bottom line was still arrived at through moralizing. «We can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.»
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».
Now to be clear, the faults of HBDers are not big. 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). 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 (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).
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. 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.
Like Bryan Pesta's career did: it took years of digging by concerned people, but this HBDer got caught on a technicality and made unemployable. He had tenure, too. As for the non-tenured faculty, we can have Turkheimer spell it out. Like Bird says, there is reason to be optimistic about the eventual result of such policies:
So there's no money in it; databases are getting closed off too; getting published is near-impossible (note that all those would-be publications deal with weaknesses of HBD research program that you lament). The paradigm is shriveling up and dying (though Hyde would beg to differ). HBDers' incompetence is the intended outcome of censorship. In time, you'll have every self-respecting scientist firmly in the blank slate camp; forget structural equation modeling, unrepentant HBDers won't understand trivial correlation coefficients, and will be wholly undeserving of attention. Won't this make your argument so much stronger? And I think this means your argument is ultimately uninteresting, as far as science or policy are concerned.
You seem to use a coarse-grained notion of politics involved, in stark contrast to your (not necessarily correct but hard-to-critique*) analysis of the technical side. Most «HBDers» are the opposite: laymen beliefs both in the heritability of human behavioral traits and in between-group differences owing to genetics overwhelmingly come from raw life experience, not from data analysis and literature; approval of papers is driven by priors and the general vibe. Likewise comes the understanding of political implications; the sense of unfairness in this debate; and the will to signal-boost arguments-like-soldiers of your allies. This sounds low-IQ, and it is, but consilience can be pretty powerful, and HBD is anything if not consilient; so they're justified in not worrying a lot about minor nitpicks.
As for what happens on the other side – let's say that your model doesn't follow from your text and may conflict with the data. Emil sums it up nicely:
Call me a misanthrope, but it's a priori implausible for people en masse to have consistent abstract preferences such as «equality» and «inequality». Equality is an obvious compromise; beyond that, people just root for the team and want their side to be on top or at least not trampled upon. Bluntly, white «rightists» want to not be punished for the underperformance of Blacks, and thus prefer an HBD narrative that puts them solidly below some groups, above others, and absolves them of their purported sin of systemic racism. «Leftists» have other ideas, so they obstruct research into between-groups genetic differences and enforce the conclusion of racism being the leading causal explanation by fiat.
But this obstruction, when perpetrated by knowledgeable people such as Kaplan or Turkheimer or Rutherford, is telling enough, and cancels out all incompetence HBDers and even run-of-the-mill racists may show.
*my impression of the topic is still best described in this quote:
Incidentally, this can no longer be found on the author's website.
The manner is recognizable enough, of course.
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.
To be blunt: «Phenotypic null hypothesis [for the genetics of personality]» is a 2013 review paper by Eric Turkheimer, with 162 citations.
Turkheimer, like Lewontin before him with his «apportionment» and, more to the point, with his corn plants (cited by Ned Block here), is making a mountain out of a common-sensical molehill, in his case to bury the monster of HBD implications that have sprang forth (as he asserts, unreasonably) from his own First Law that he now seeks to reframe (as much is stated in the paper). Moreover, you both are sufficiently obscurantist and informal that it's hard to tell if you're gesturing at the same mountain:
vs yours:
Ok, and?
….The problem you talk about in your Substack post is real, although not nearly as damaging with regards to the sort of HBD beliefs most salient in the culture war and pro/anti-HBD debate (i.e. not the issue of bullied gays) as one could assume from careless reading of your initial post. (Besides, we have plenty of data such as admixture and, as of late, GWAS confirming simple additive model for the group difference – qualitatively similar to the case of height, not similar to gay-bullying and personality research). Measurement error is a fundamental problem; though as better-informed people remind us, there are methods, e.g. common pathway models, which help against it, and HBD research using those methods has yielded largely the same conclusions. It is also possible to directly test for AE vs ACE, precluding the sort of erroneous assumptions you warn against.
This is what is recommended is a textbook, literally, in crypto-HBDer Plomin's «Behavioral Genetics» 2012 edition (that is, anticipating Turkheimer's paper by a year). Consider p.157:
Or in a section about model fitting, pp. 380-390:
Plomin practices what he preaches, too – here's an example of a paper.
So yeah, those are real problems with real countermeasures. «Phenotypic null hypothesis» is a meme, and there are apparently only two people forcing this meme.
Again, what Turkheimer is doing here is not different from Lewontin's tricks, which are known to have been motivated by politics. It's uncanny how similar these situations are. In the entry-level «Making sense of Heritability, pp. 60:-62:
By all means, do promote statistical literacy and demand intellectual honesty among HBDers, do shame us for our sloppiness. Keep discussing this in terms of phenotypic null hypothesis, if you must. But do not gaslight. This argument, and in this specific formulation, is not Behavioral Genetics 101, but your recent contribution to the debate, and it's more of a rhetorical nature.
Ok, so regarding this paper:
According to Plomin, the goal of the paper is to test the plausibility of evolutionary theories are about environmental sensitivity by using twin studies to look for heritability:
This is very much the sort of nonsense the phenotypic null hypothesis is an objection to. Everything is heritable, and we have good theoretical understanding of why that is. It is thus of no evidentiary value to find that things are heritable, and this shouldn't be treated as a confirmation of evolutionary theories, which destroys the whole point of the paper.
Not so relevant to the phenotypic null hypothesis and I haven't looked at this in detail as it's a citation of a different study, but the cited study makes me suspicious: They didn't find any main effect of the treatment, so this was a subgroup analysis of exactly the sort that Scott Alexander has warned me about.
I acknowledge that common pathway models/factor models can control for some types of measurement error in some scenarios, but it doesn't really seem to work for personality traits (and therefore not for HSC either, unless HSC is an unusual personality trait). The appropriate way to do this for personality data is multi-informant data, which tends to lead to way higher heritabilities for personality, indicating that a substantial proportion of the nonshared environment component is measurement error, even with naive common pathways.
Plomin finds that all the "good" personality traits are correlated, i.e. emotional stability, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness are all positively correlated with each other. The model he chooses to apply to those correlations assumes that these correlations are substantive, but I believe that is an inappropriate model.
Correlations between the Big Five personality traits within a single rater appear to reflect a "Halo"/"social desirability" bias factor. The way we can tell this is because it fails to correlate across informants. I.e. while it's true that you rating yourself as more extraverted correlates with you rating yourself as more conscientious, you rating yourself as more extraverted does not correlate with others rating you as more conscientious. See for instance this paper.
Also I believe it's well-established that the different subscales of HSC differ from each other in their correlations with the Big Five, and indeed he replicates that finding in the study. However, this pattern of correlations is incompatible with the notion that the correlations between HSC subscales and Big Five is mediated by the HSC common pathway, which makes his later models very strange.
In conclusion, the Plomin study you linked is a fractal of bad study design. In many ways it's a good example of the necessity to further popularize the phenotypic null hypothesis. However, the study also has severe flaws beyond the phenotypic null hypothesis. This is cruxy to me: if you can convince me that Plomin's study is good, then I will likely grant that I was wrong about my point about the phenotypic null hypothesis, but conversely I think Plomin's study is really bad and I think Turkheimer has to deal with an endless stream of studies that are equally as bad as Plomin's here, so I think this serves as an excellent case study that explains why Turkheimer is so bothered by behavioral genetics.
I rest my case.
Wait is the study even by Plomin? The authors listed are:
None of whom seem to be Plomin.
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I don't have time to respond to this right now, as I'm on my phone, but just quickly skimming it, it looks cruxy to me. I will respond once I get home.
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I'm not claiming it to be damaging to HBD beliefs, I'm claiming it to be damaging to certain types of arguments and findings HBDers often make. There can be bad arguments for correct conclusions, and people who make those arguments should stop making them because it introduces noise and makes it harder to find the good arguments.
Again I posted various examples of people not properly applying the phenotypic null hypothesis. Let's zoom into one of them to understand the problem:
https://twitter.com/tailcalled/status/1475441032292667394
If one doesn't understand the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this is an exciting study. Researchers have shown jealousy and restricted sociosexuality to be genetic! And to be biologically linked to each other! In the past I would have been really interested in these sorts of results, as tying into all sorts of evo psych theories.
However, when appreciating the phenotypic null hypothesis, it's a boring study. What are we even supposed to learn from it? Obviously these variables are going to be heritable and genetically correlated, but this doesn't really tell us much.
If you disagree with this notion, then feel encouraged to make your case for why this is such an important and meaningful finding.
I don't think Turkheimer is being an obscurantist here. He's a leading behavior geneticist and an editor for a behavior genetics journal; he has to deal with an endless stream of papers that proudly talk about how they've shown this and that to be genetic. He's got excellent reasons to try to make people accept the phenotypic null hypothesis, since it's a huge piece of missing knowledge.
But these models are rarely used. Even from the "better-informed people", I have had trouble getting it for e.g. testing the causal effect of g.
This is badly powered when C is smallish, e.g. try computing the power requirement for C^2=0.01.
I don't see how GWAS additivity defends personality research, can you expand? In particular I don't see how phenotypic null hypothesis predicts nonadditivity.
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