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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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It basically boils down to a longwinded form of "correlation doesn't necessary imply causation", i.e. if parents and children show significant correlation on a certain measure, that doesn't guarantee it has a genetic outcome. A good example someone posted downthread would be "knowledege of the French language", which is highly correlated between parents and their children, but which obviously isn't genetic.

I disagree with this presentation of my views. I am admitting that genetics is causally upstream of the heritable variables; the issue is that not every causal link in the chain from genes to the variable are meaningfully biological. I don't think the French example is an example of what I am talking about at all.

He's not really calling out anyone here, and importantly he's not necessarily saying this is an asymmetric problem with HBDers, just that some HBDers do it, which... well of course they do. There are knuckleheads on both sides.

Yes. The thing that triggered it was going through the vault and seeing that a post going "haha, HBDers are so much better than antis" had been declared a "best of".

He seems to mostly just be patrolling the pro-HBD side for bad arguments as a way to advance discussion, not necessarily to dunk on the HBD side as entirely meritless.

Yes, there's a severe need for patrolling for bad arguments IMO. Both sides seem to have turned into echo chambers.

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