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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Particularly relevant to HBD, my understanding is that you might say that blacks scoring lower on tests might be shown to be heritable, but perhaps that could be because of racism. Since blackness is also genetically heritable, if blackness were to cause them to experience racism which causes their test scores to be lower, then this would be a plausible explanation for why low test scores appear to be genetically heritable in blacks, but it would actually be due to blackness being genetically inherited and that causing low test scores through a more indirect means than low intelligence.

Yes, that would be one potential example (though I don't expect this to be the true answer because it has been studied by e.g. looking for whether skin color is a mediator, though I'm currently trying to commission a different study which looks at it from a different angle).

However the phenotypic null hypothesis of course applies to tons and tons of behavior genetics, not just within race stuff but also lots of other places. And HBDers often discuss other behavior genetic studies without properly appreciating the phenotypic null hypothesis.

I think people are perhaps responding to you defensively because this feels like an isolated demand for rigor or weakmanning directed specifically at HBD, without considering the epistemic failings of hardline blank-slatists which are surely even greater.

I mean I've definitely called out people on both sides for nonsense. I even tend to hang out in Turkheimer's mentions and critique him. So I don't think I'm doing isolated demands for rigor, I think I'm doing widespread demands for rigor.

Also I think that showing a trait to be heritable has to count as weak Bayesian evidence at least in favor of a genetic explanation.

The prior probability that a variable is heritable is really really high. Meanwhile, Bayesian updating depends on the probability of the evidence being low, as otherwise it doesn't change your priors much.

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