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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Not the poster you replied to but I hope I don't do his argument a disservice.

Maybe being raised in a middle class house with two parents causes good outcomes, just like genes cause good outcomes. Then, controlling for one would show a correlation with the other (and outcomes).

How do studies usually show "greater effect" in situations like these? Do two studies with different controls and compare at the correlations? How is "greater effect" defined?

One typically compares outcomes of identical twins vs. fraternal twins (who are as related to each other as regular siblings). If the correlation between identical twins is the same as correlation between fraternal twins, it means that it’s probably not genes that are causing the outcomes. If, instead, outcomes of identical twins are more highly correlated than outcomes of fraternal twins, that suggests that the casuality is genetic. This is because both fraternal and identical twins are sharing the same home environment (of, say, middle class home with two parents), so if it was the shared environment that was causing all of the outcomes, you wouldn’t expect the correlation between outcomes of identical twins to be different than that of fraternal twins.

The traditional method is to look at twins raised separately. The genes are held constant because twins but with different environments. To cut it all short most measures correlate much more strongly with birth parent than adoptive parent.

Not really, twins raised apart are rather too rare to be practically useful. Instead, one typically compares identical twins vs fraternal twins or non-twin siblings, or biological siblings vs adopted siblings.

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