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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33491 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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If racial purity is supposed to lead to superior intelligence and intelligence is supposed to result in greater production (amongst other things) what does Germany and Japan falling way behind on production tell us?

you are using a lack of correlation to infer a lack of causation

Yes, that is exactly what I'm doing. While correlation does not prove causation, causation requires correlation, which is why the two are so often conflated.

In symbolic terms; if A is always found in the presence of B, this does not prove that A causes B. B could instead cause A, or both B and A could be a product of a third unidentified factor C. However if A does in fact cause B, "If A then B" will be a logically true statement, and thus lack of correlation (IE A in the absence of B) is actually very strong evidence against causation.

even though B causes D.

This might be a language barrier issue but that is not what you wrote. An equality is not an implication, and implications are not commutative.

That said I think I understand what you're trying to say and I don't think it matters. As like I said to @sansampersamp by acknowledging the presence of a 3rd unidentified factor that can overpower heritability you've effectively falsified the the bulk of the HBD-advocate's claims and rendered their policy proscriptions moot.

causation is not an implication

Causation is absosultly an implication, "If A then B" is the literal definition of causation.

Even ceding everything else, how can the mere existence of a factor that can occasionally have a larger effect than genes, "falsify" HBD?

Because it's not the motte that matters it's the bailey when people talk about "HBD" the claim being made is not that certain traits are heritable the claim being made is that genetics has such an outsize effect on that it's pointless to consider any other.

Edit: more to the point, I literally provided an example above where B causes D but has no correlation

No you didn't, because again implications are not commutative. The order of operations matters.

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