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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:
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.
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.
And they've had the reins and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.
But I honestly don't even care if this ridiculous debate is settled, all I want is for the blank slatists to actually have to justify their interventions and pay some cost when the inevitably fail. That all the costs of their failures are dumped on their outgroup is unacceptable.
pretty much:
https://i1.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ccf_20170201_reeves_3.png?w=768&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C9999px&ssl=1
The black-white achievement gap has proven impervious to all efforts to fix it
same for the gender gap
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/satnew.png
But individual absolute ability may have increased , but group differences persist. It's intellectually dishonest to claim that enough hasn't been tried. Policy makers have invested considerable money and effort at narrowing such gaps, with piss-poor results to show for it.
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?
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.
However, it seems difficult to explain lack of girls' participation in an all-girl coding camp by any form of male behavior. In that sense, code camp intervention has not been tested, but has been attempted, which is itself a test. Of course, motte = "patriarchy is fully general and can be hosted on female brains", bailey = "men are sexist and that's why women don't code".
If we take this entirely seriously, dismantling patriarchy here would require forcing girls to go to code camp.
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.
Hm, that seems interesting but unfalsifiable. Even if parents try to pretend really hard that everyone is living in such a culture, can't you always say that the children are picking up on their deep-seated true social beliefs?
That said, it would be fascinating to attempt this. (If all kinds of unethical.) Gonzo homeschooling girlcoder conspiracy when?
edit: Of course, another problem: "We formed a community of 500 female programmers." How do you screen off genetic causes? Everyone adopts?
edit: If self-socialization is correct, but so is sexual preference differences, wouldn't this cause significant suffering as boys and girls attempt to fit themselves to a role they're not suited for in an attempt to fit in with their parents? Then again, plausibly "not much more than ordinary growing up."
edit: I wonder to what degree growing up in a progressive family and school environment already approximates this.
edit: ! Can you test to which degree girls who grow up in prog environments go into programming vs trad? If this thesis is true, shouldn't it have some effect?
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