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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36180 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.

So, first off, thank you for posting, and apologies in advance if the criticism I'll give comes across as too harsh. You seem to be trying to get more seen and read, so I'm going to try to help.

First -- your writing style doesn't work well for me. It's too abstract, and you don't clearly state your point. For example, your point #1 "Heritability simply does not mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean - because of the phenotypic null hypothesis." What is your point here? What do you think "HBDs want it to mean"? What is the "phenotypic null hypothesis"? It's not good writing to make me chase down you thoughts, especially on other sites, especially before you've proven you're worth the work. I went to that site, and am not much more enlightened. You seem to somewhere make the point "Things influenced by genes often go though non-biological channels". Or maybe "things that look inherited aren't always". Sure, I'd say both are fairly non-controversial. A classic example of the second is, e.g. "speaking French" which looks inherited on the surface, but is clearly not biological. And yes, our environment and society mediate all kinds of things, we live in a complex interconnected world.

Do you have more of a point? I couldn't really tell (of course, that can be on me, but ... I've read and understood a fair number of others on this topic, but not your writing...) I really don't know what your code and diagrams at the end are supposed to show. Summarize your cool conclusion! E.g. "Even though X is not directly responsible, in a naive analysis it looks like it is, exactly like QQQ, which actually is directly responsible. Here's how that can play out ...". I think you're saying something like that, but you don't bother actually saying it (or I missed it).

In any case you sort of seem to be saying "we can't figure anything out" which both seems wrong, and kind of useless. Do you apply this to all such studies? Maybe we should -- I admit, I tend to write off almost of all psychological and sociological studies these days, because they seem so ideologically captured. On the other hand, between statistics, twin studies (and separated twin studies), and sibling studies, we seem to be able to do a pretty good job on some things.

Second -- you seem to be coming at this from a place of significant bias. "Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes," is an incredibly weak straw-man, it's basically "Everyone I disagree with is a racist". Is that really the best you can do, in terms of extending charity to the people you disagree with? I personally, like most of the others here, see the acknowledgement of group differences (and for what it's worth, I don't really care much if it's culture or biology, and both seem taboo anyway) as primarily an alternative for differing outcomes, without discrimination being the ONLY explanation.

I'm in tech. There aren't many women, nor many black people. This is ascribed to sexism and racism, which doesn't match what I've seen, experienced, or heard from the affected people (from women at least; I haven't asked many black colleagues about racism). I see my company following policy to massively privilege both groups, and to blame white cis-men for all the problems, and those both seem wrong, and even damaging to me (and to a number of people in the targeted groups, e.g. women who just want to be SWEs, and not feel they got their role because of their sex, and no, I'm not concern trolling, the suspicion around the privileging is real). I see differing interests (and maybe ability at the margins) and degrees as the main reasons for the differing representation, but we're not allowed to notice that, as "It's not the pipeline". James Damore got fired for trying to make this point.

You also see this censorship of blasphemy in the US, especially around crime, where apparently pointing out some choice statistics around violent crime is considered a hate crime. (Again, FWIW, I'd consider those stats more a cultural issue, but it's a pretty important one, upstream of the 'getting shot by police' issue).

So anyway, what I'd like from you, and I think would benefit you, is to tighten up your writing -- make your point first, then provide an explanation of it (it's a classic academic / systemic thinker error to do it the other way around). Make things more concrete. Work from a specific example and tie your points back to it. People are reluctant to trust generic models, as they are often used to lie (see Abigail Thompson's dissection of Hong-Page's "mathematical proof that diversity trumps ability". There's a nice discussion of it here

Also, try to be more charitable to your outgroup.

Also, as per the community rules, "don't attempt to build consensus", as you do when you write "... which claimed to find that effort does not matter for IQ scores. This obviously massively contradicts common sense,"

No, this doesn't "obviously massively contradict" my common sense, and I think many would disagree. In fact, I thought one of the main points of IQ tests, rather than "effort tests", is that neither effort nor prep makes much of a difference to them. Otherwise, for example, they wouldn't stay very stable over time (which I understand they do). Prep courses would also have more value, which I don't think do. Do you think when people can't make intellectual leaps others do, they just aren't trying hard enough in that particular moment? I think most would agree effort plays some role -- if I don't care or try at all on an IQ tests, and answer at random, I'll have a low score. If I try to be fast and disciplined, and use all my test-taking savvy, I'll probably (?) do better than if I just breeze through (although I wonder). But basically, once you're trying to do well, it's not really clear what "trying harder" even means on IQ test. It's not like pushing on a bar (and honestly, even for that the range where trying, vs training and genes and drugs, makes a difference, is pretty small in that moment. If I can barely do one pull-up, trying really hard might mean I do one, or two, but I'm generally not going to be able to do 10). So anyway, stop claiming consensus on things people will disagree on (especially things where your "consensus" seems to go against standard definitions).

I can't really comment on your main article, because I don't understand it beyond "assigning causation back to genes is tricky", which, I agree with, but, if that is your point, isn't a very exciting one, nor is the the pwn you seem to think it is. But if you have a different point, please state it clearly and simply, with a concrete example, and I'll try to address it.

First -- your writing style doesn't work well for me. It's too abstract, and you don't clearly state your point. For example, your point #1 "Heritability simply does not mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean - because of the phenotypic null hypothesis." What is your point here? What do you think "HBDs want it to mean"? What is the "phenotypic null hypothesis"? It's not good writing to make me chase down you thoughts, especially on other sites, especially before you've proven you're worth the work. I went to that site, and am not much more enlightened. You seem to somewhere make the point "Things influenced by genes often go though non-biological channels". Or maybe "things that look inherited aren't always". Sure, I'd say both are fairly non-controversial. A classic example of the second is, e.g. "speaking French" which looks inherited on the surface, but is clearly not biological. And yes, our environment and society mediate all kinds of things, we live in a complex interconnected world.

Do you have more of a point? I couldn't really tell (of course, that can be on me, but ... I've read and understood a fair number of others on this topic, but not your writing...) I really don't know what your code and diagrams at the end are supposed to show. Summarize your cool conclusion! E.g. "Even though X is not directly responsible, in a naive analysis it looks like it is, exactly like QQQ, which actually is directly responsible. Here's how that can play out ...". I think you're saying something like that, but you don't bother actually saying it (or I missed it).

Here are some examples of places where I'd bring it up on twitter:

The post comes from frustration with these sorts of situations. Importantly, it's not the specific interactions but instead that they are repeated and that often not much update happens. This seems like a point that should get signal-boosted more in a healthy community.

In any case you sort of seem to be saying "we can't figure anything out" which both seems wrong, and kind of useless. Do you apply this to all such studies? Maybe we should -- I admit, I tend to write off almost of all psychological and sociological studies these days, because they seem so ideologically captured. On the other hand, between statistics, twin studies (and separated twin studies), and sibling studies, we seem to be able to do a pretty good job on some things.

Yes, frequently scroll through my twitter and just fire of random quick tweets that debunk random social science studies. And I don't trust any social science studies until I've checked the methodology myself.

Second -- you seem to be coming at this from a place of significant bias. "Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes," is an incredibly weak straw-man, it's basically "Everyone I disagree with is a racist". Is that really the best you can do, in terms of extending charity to the people you disagree with? I personally, like most of the others here, see the acknowledgement of group differences (and for what it's worth, I don't really care much if it's culture or biology, and both seem taboo anyway) as primarily an alternative for differing outcomes, without discrimination being the ONLY explanation.

I'm in tech. There aren't many women, nor many black people. This is ascribed to sexism and racism, which doesn't match what I've seen, experienced, or heard from the affected people (from women at least; I haven't asked many black colleagues about racism). I see my company following policy to massively privilege both groups, and to blame white cis-men for all the problems, and those both seem wrong, and even damaging to me (and to a number of people in the targeted groups, e.g. women who just want to be SWEs, and not feel they got their role because of their sex, and no, I'm not concern trolling, the suspicion around the privileging is real). I see differing interests (and maybe ability at the margins) and degrees as the main reasons for the differing representation, but we're not allowed to notice that, as "It's not the pipeline". James Damore got fired for trying to make this point.

You also see this censorship of blasphemy in the US, especially around crime, where apparently pointing out some choice statistics around violent crime is considered a hate crime. (Again, FWIW, I'd consider those stats more a cultural issue, but it's a pretty important one, upstream of the 'getting shot by police' issue).

So anyway, what I'd like from you, and I think would benefit you, is to tighten up your writing -- make your point first, then provide an explanation of it (it's a classic academic / systemic thinker error to do it the other way around). Make things more concrete. Work from a specific example and tie your points back to it. People are reluctant to trust generic models, as they are often used to lie (see Abigail Thompson's dissection of Hong-Page's "mathematical proof that diversity trumps ability". There's a nice discussion of it here

Also, try to be more charitable to your outgroup.

You're making assumptions about my ingroups/outgroups that aren't necessarily true. E.g. I've spent tons of money on HBD-aligned research, partly for motivations similar to what you describe here.

No, this doesn't "obviously massively contradict" my common sense, and I think many would disagree. In fact, I thought one of the main points of IQ tests, rather than "effort tests", is that neither effort nor prep makes much of a difference to them. Otherwise, for example, they wouldn't stay very stable over time (which I understand they do).

I was under the impression that the test-retest reliability of IQ tests is 0.85? If we assume that the test-retest reliability of effort is 50% (I suspect it's higher, but let's be generous to your side), and we go by the estimate that 8% of variance in IQ is down to effort, then that would mean that effort would introduce an unreliability of 50%*8%=4% to IQ tests. This is considerably less than the 15% unreliability that I've commonly seen, so I don't see how your argument is even halfway close to working out here.

Prep courses would also have more value, which I don't think do. Do you think when people can't make intellectual leaps others do, they just aren't trying hard enough in that particular moment?

Isn't the item level of IQ tests (which seems like the closest analogy to intellectual leaps to me) dominated by noise? So I'd say noise, not g or effort.

Also even if we ignore the item noise point, by the numbers I'm giving, test effort would only be 8% of the explanation for test underperformance.

I think most would agree effort plays some role -- if I don't care or try at all on an IQ tests, and answer at random, I'll have a low score. If I try to be fast and disciplined, and use all my test-taking savvy, I'll probably (?) do better than if I just breeze through (although I wonder). But basically, once you're trying to do well, it's not really clear what "trying harder" even means on IQ test. It's not like pushing on a bar (and honestly, even for that the range where trying, vs training and genes and drugs, makes a difference, is pretty small in that moment. If I can barely do one pull-up, trying really hard might mean I do one, or two, but I'm generally not going to be able to do 10). So anyway, stop claiming consensus on things people will disagree on (especially things where your "consensus" seems to go against standard definitions).

It sounds to me that you are granting the basic point (effort plays some role), but then acting like you are disagreeing anyway? Is it a quantitative disagreement? If so, what is your estimate for the quantitative effect that effort plays?

Sorry, didn't check your Twitter, as I'm not on it, and don't like it (and don't like following links just to know what someone's talking about; I do like them for references).

I guess if you stated clearly what you think contributes to IQ scores then perhaps we'd mostly agree. As I think you say, accounting for 8% variance would be not too far from noise. That still seems quite a bit too high to me, and I don't really see how you clearly quantify 'effort' but would think to myself -- "whatever, if you want to believe that, go ahead it doesn't seem wrong enough to be worth fighting over". What I read from your initial post is that effort was more important than everything else, which seemed clearly wrong. You gave this impression by not specifying how much effect you thought that it had, and by saying people claiming it didn't have an effect "obviously massively contradicts common sense," which is a very strong formulation.

FWIW, I expect a very asymptotic-type curve, that rises extremely sharply from [answered questions at random without reading them] to [did test pretty normally], and then is pretty flat. It's like (but not quite as extreme) saying the kind of pen you use matters, because if yours is broken, or breaks half-way through, you'll get a lower score. So effort is not very interesting. But sure somehow accounting for 4% of the variance is plausible (sorry, to me 8% really seems too high, I'd think how well I slept, the questions I got, my mood, time of day, my pencil, and a bunch of other things would play a larger role than nebulous 'effort'). You seemed to be implying that means IQ tests are meaningless (and apologies if I misread it, again, please stately plainly your point so that doesn't happen as often), which that doesn't seem like a strong argument for. If that's not what you're implying, what is your point in bringing up effort?

Sorry, didn't check your Twitter, as I'm not on it, and don't like it (and don't like following links just to know what someone's talking about; I do like them for references).

I think it would be best to read what people are saying before responding to them.

I guess if you stated clearly what you think contributes to IQ scores then perhaps we'd mostly agree. [...] What I read from your initial post is that effort was more important than everything else, which seemed clearly wrong. You gave this impression by not specifying how much effect you thought that it had, and by saying people claiming it didn't have an effect "obviously massively contradicts common sense," which is a very strong formulation.

Sorry, the point about how it "obviously massively contradicts common sense" was not meant to be interpreted as a measure of effect size, it was meant to be interpreted literally: as an expression that if I went out and told people that IQ tests don't depend on effort (as HBDers wpuld have me do), then people would conclude that I am delusionally worshipping IQ tests - and as I showed in the thread, it appears that they wpuld be right to conclude that.

That still seems quite a bit too high to me, and I don't really see how you clearly quantify 'effort'

🤷‍♀️ I just went with whatever quantification chosen by the leading IQ researcher whose study got signal-boosted. It's quite possible it's bad as I didn't look into it in detail, but if it is bad then I feel like that also reflects badly on HBDers for signal-boosting a study that uses a bad measure.

sorry, to me 8% really seems too high, I'd think how well I slept, the questions I got, my mood, time of day, my pencil, and a bunch of other things would play a larger role than nebulous 'effort'

Those might be correlated with effort. Mood in particular seems likely mediated by effort.

I don't really agree that effort is particularly nebulous of a concept. Have you never had the experience of just quickly marking down your first thoughts without wanting to bother thinking them through and not double-checking that they are right?

If that's not what you're implying, what is your point in bringing up effort?

My point in bringing up effort is that I was scrolling through my twitter timeline that is filled with social science, and then I saw all the HBDers I followed praising this guy for debunking the notion that IQ is affected by effort. And then I thought, hm, that sounds implausible, I should double-check the statistics, and it turned out the statistics were wrong and actually effort is affected by IQ.

I don't want to replace leftists lying to me about racial difference in g in order to rationalize racial equality with rightists lying to me about effort in IQ tests in order to rationalize racial inequality. I don't think I need special justification for wanting to know the truth about each question in a decoupled way from everything else. But if we absolutely should justify it by practical means, then a straightforward justification would be that this directly contradicts people's experience when filling out tests, and therefore looks delusional to insist on, presumably on the margin reducing the number of people sympathetic to HBD.

Sorry, didn't check your Twitter, as I'm not on it, and don't like it (and don't like following links just to know what someone's talking about; I do like them for references).

I think it would be best to read what people are saying before responding to them.

Write it here, clearly, and I will. Don't send me to Twitter, or your blog (or do, but realize you've lost much of your audience). Reading this, I think you would be better off if you spent less time on Twitter (well, I think that goes for just about everyone...)

I guess if you stated clearly what you think contributes to IQ scores then perhaps we'd mostly agree. [...] What I read from your initial post is that effort was more important than everything else, which seemed clearly wrong. You gave this impression by not specifying how much effect you thought that it had, and by saying people claiming it didn't have an effect "obviously massively contradicts common sense," which is a very strong formulation.

Sorry, the point about how it "obviously massively contradicts common sense" was not meant to be interpreted as a measure of effect size, it was meant to be interpreted literally: as an expression that if I went out and told people that IQ tests don't depend on effort (as HBDers wpuld have me do), then people would conclude that I am delusionally worshipping IQ tests - and as I showed in the thread, it appears that they wpuld be right to conclude that.

I don't think people would conclude that, and I don't think you proved that in this thread. You remind me of the XKCD about using language in a very non-standard way and then feeling clever that they didn't understand you.

I don't really agree that effort is particularly nebulous of a concept. Have you never had the experience of just quickly marking down your first thoughts without wanting to bother thinking them through and not double-checking that they are right?

I get the concept of effort, but I think it's difficult to turn into something where you can say you're giving 20%, 50% 80% effort. But it's a minor point.

I feel like you're not listening to me, and I assume you're feeling the same about me. I think we've both reached our limits of what we think we can convey to the other. I wish you luck and success in better understanding g, IQ tests, HBD, and conservatives in general. My final two requests: work on writing more clearly, and listen more with the intent of understanding, rather than proving why you're right. (I will try to do the same!)

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