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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36184 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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.

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?

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.

Your example seems pretty easy to test. There are lots of twin pairs where one is homosexual and one isn't the heritability is only 30%. You could just see if the non-homosexual identical twins have the same rates of mental illness as the homosexual ones.

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.

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