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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36185 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.

I'm not sure that hereditarianism vs environmentalism matters all that much if one believes that IQ scores are predictive across populations and that the interventions that have been tried do not last/work long term. (Not every environmentalist believes this of course.) It's like arguing over the Copenhagen interpretation vs the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics when all you're doing is using the math to calculate the band structure of a semiconductor. But interpreting a model rather than using the model to make predictions seems like a secondary concern.

I think the distinction would be that hereditarianism mostly rules out the possibility of an intervention that could work even if it hasn't been discovered yet, while environmentalism would suggest that better or more extreme interventions would work (in the most extreme case, baby swapping, though I don't think any serious environmentalists actually advocate this). It's like the distinction between a mathematical theorem that has had no counter example found but is still open, versus a mathematical theorem that has been proven/disproven.

In the quantum mechanics case, there is no practical testable distinction and never will be, but in the HBD case there's the potential for a distinction in the future even if there's no meaningful difference for most people in the short-term.

I think the distinction would be that hereditarianism mostly rules out the possibility of an intervention that could work even if it hasn't been discovered yet

Does it? Unless the IQ is directly influenced by the same genes that cause increased melanin production, protect against malaria, make your hair kinky or give you big flat noses and fleshy lips, you can always intervene. Even if the specific genes are unknown (and thus embryo selection will not work), it will take just a few generations to breed lower-IQ genes out of the population if you do it aggressively.

Sure, straightforward selective breeding and culling might work. But it ain't gonna happen.

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