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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32007 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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A few days ago, I made a comment defending Turkheimer and critizing HBDers, in response to a vaulted "best of" comment dismissing Turkheimer. One of the main things my comment centered on was the phenotypic null hypothesis, which can roughly speaking be summarized as "correlation does not imply confounding" + "causation does not imply unmediated and unmoderated causation". Or as I phrased it:

Put simply, the phenotypic null hypothesis is this: Heritability tells you that if you go up through the chain of causation, then you will often end up with genes. However, there may be many ways that variables can be connected to each other, and there’s no particular reason to expect that every step along the chain of causation from genes to outcomes is best thought of as biological.

The consensus claimed that this was well-understood by HBDers around here, and perhaps even by HBDers more generally. Now I don't know that I buy that because it really doesn't seem well-understood in many places other than with people around Turkheimer.

In the thread, one person ended up posting an example of a paper which supposedly understood the nuances I was talking about. However, I disagree with that, and think that it is instead an excellent example of the problems with HBD epistemics. For instance, the paper opens by saying that the goal is to test evolutionary psychology hypotheses by testing for heritability in some personality traits:

According to the recent evolutionary-inspired theories (i.e., differential susceptibility [1], biological sensitivity to context [2]), humans, like many other species [3], differ substantially in their sensitivity to contextual factors, with some more susceptible to environmental influences than others. Importantly, these theories suggest that heightened sensitivity predicts both the reactivity to adverse contexts as well as the propensity to benefit from supportive features of positive environments. In other words, sensitivity is proposed to influence the impact of environmental influences in a “for better and for worse” manner [4]. These prominent theories converge on the proposition that genetic factors play a significant role in individual differences in Environmental Sensitivity (ES) [1, 2, 5].

Now, if you don't appreciate the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this would probably seem like a reasonable or even excellent idea. Evolution is about how genes are selected based on the traits they produce; if something is genetically coded, then evolution must have produced it, and conversely if evolution has produced it then it must be genetic.

But if you appreciate the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this study is of minimal relevance, almost no evidentiary value, and perhaps even eye-rollingly stupid. Of course the scales you administer are going to be heritable, because pretty much everything is heritable. Heritability doesn't mean that you've got anything meaningfully biological.

Now the thing is, my impression is that behavior geneticists do this sort of nonsense all the time, and that HBDers take them seriously when they do it. If HBDers instead properly appreciated the phenotypic null hypothesis, they would look somewhere else for this sort of info, or maybe even fix behavior genetics by propagating the info backwards to HBD-sympathetic behavior geneticists that they should read more Turkheimer. Notably, since this study was suggested as exemplary by someone here on TheMotte, it seems to provide at least an existence proof of someone who does not have a proper understanding of the phenotypic null hypothesis.

If I understand you correctly, this is what you are calling the Phenotypic Null Hypothesis: that a trait being heritable does not mean it necessarily has a direct genetic cause. 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.

That seems plainly reasonable and true so far as I can tell. 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. 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.

Since blackness is also genetically heritable, if blackness were to cause them to experience racism which causes their test scores to be lower

Note that there have been studies trying to control for this, like this admixture study:

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Using data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we examined whether European ancestry predicted cognitive ability over and above both parental socioeconomicstatus (SES) and measures of eye, hair, and skin color. First, using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we verified that strict factorial invariance held between self-identified African and European-Americans. The differences between these groups, which were equivalent to 14.72 IQ points, were primarily (75.59%) due to difference in general cognitive ability (g), consistent with Spearman’s hypothesis. We found a relationship between European admixture and g. This relationship existed in samples of (a) self-identified monoracial African-Americans (B = 0.78, n = 2,179), (b) monoracial African and biracial African-European-Americans, with controls added for self-identified biracial status (B = 0.85, n = 2407), and (c) combined European, African-European, and African-American participants, with controls for self-identified race/ethnicity (B = 0.75, N = 7,273). Controlling for parental SES modestly attenuated these relationships whereas controlling for measures of skin, hair, and eye color did not.

So black people with 30% European ancestry do better on the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery than those with 10% European ancestry, which is already some remarkably fine-grained racism. But people do talk about "colorism" and so they look at genes linked to skin/hair/eye color, but those genes don't seem to have an impact when ancestry is accounted for.

Skin color (assessed genetically with the highly accurate predictor [79, 93] was associated with cognitive ability (Model 1b, Table 5), but made no significant incremental contribution when ancestry was also in the model (Model 2, Table 5). Results could still be due to phenotypic confounding from other appearance variables. To test this possibility, we fitted a number of models including skin, hair, and eye color. We found that none of these features had significant effects on their own, except for brown eye color, which was positively related to cognitive ability, but with a large standard error.

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Note that the anti-HBD crowd (i.e. the Turkheimer side of the debate) have put in some effort to make the author of this publication Bryan J. Pesta, a tenured professor (!), unemployable. I've mentioned this in my first response to tailcalled, but some choice quotes from a Chronicle article praising the cancellation, to understand how the perception of ambiguity in this topic is maintained, indeed how the sausage gets made. It reads very much like a 30's Pravda report on courageous pioneers catching and handling a villain wrecker kulak to the authorities, Scooby Doo style, but that's the clownish reality of the American academia.

Liam O’Brien was a master’s student in political science at Cleveland State University in 2019 when a screenshot from a new article, titled “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” crawled across his Twitter feed.

To the untrained eye, the abstract was highly technical. “Using the ancestry-adjusted association between MTAG eduPGS and g from the monoracial African-American sample as an estimate of the transracially unbiased validity of eduPGS (B = 0.124),” the authors wrote, “the results suggest that as much as 20%-25% of the race difference in g can be naïvely explained by known cognitive ability-related variants.”

The argument dressed up in that statistical jargon? That Black people are genetically disposed to be less intelligent than white people.

O’Brien was disturbed to see that debunked racial-hierarchy arguments popular in the late 19th and early 20th century had a toehold in modern academe. Scientifically rigorous research arguing that intelligence is inherited is itself controversial, but few geneticists take seriously the claim that intelligence is racially linked.

His dismay turned to outrage when he discovered that one of the authors, Bryan J. Pesta, was a tenured professor in Cleveland State’s business school. His home institution was essentially providing a soapbox for racist pseudoscience.

O’Brien had a history of political activism, so he did what came naturally, talking to students and professors about Pesta’s article, and trying to get him censured. [...]

A look at Pesta’s RateMyProfessors page shows students generally rated him very highly, describing him as “hilarious,” “interesting,” and “easy.” One warned: “If you’re easily offended, you might not like some of his jokes, especially when he compares certain graphs to phallic symbols.” But none of the 74 reviews complains about racism.

The Chronicle reached out to 10 Black students who graduated from the business school with bachelor’s or master’s degrees in 2022. Of the three who replied, none said they were familiar with Pesta.

“Literally 100s of Black students have taken my classes,” Pesta wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “I’ve won merit pay for teaching many times. I was regard [sic] as among the best teachers in the business college.”

“If I were racist, or even overly political,” he wrote, “I submit I would have been exposed by now.” [..]

Many racial hereditarians present their claims as widely accepted but deliberately suppressed facts in the scientific community. They blame the political correctness of academe for their difficulty publishing in well-respected journals.

Their critics argue that shoddy scholarship and a refusal to account for developments in the study of genetics keep racial hereditarians marginal. Even respected scholars who believe genes play a role in intelligence argue that the role of environmental factors is too complicated and profound to disentangle. Behavioral geneticists like Kathryn Paige Harden and Eric Turkheimer repudiate the idea that IQ differences between races are rooted in genetics. [..]

For “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” in 2019, Pesta had three co-authors: Jordan Lasker, John G.R. Fuerst, and Emil O.W. Kirkegaard. The Chronicle attempted to contact all of them via publicly listed email addresses, but received no replies.

[a section on trying to find their vulnerabilities]

Thomas E. Schläpfer, a research clinical psychiatrist at Germany’s University of Freiburg who studies interventional biological psychiatry, took charge of the journal in 2020. He said he had been unaware until contacted by The Chronicle of Pesta’s publication or any problems with his brief tenure as editor.

After reading Pesta’s article, he wrote, “While the scientific methods sound impressive, I find the hypothesis both ludicrous and demeaning.” [...]

O’Brien, the political-science graduate student, tried not to let Pesta’s work go ignored. He gathered students from various activist groups to make an action plan. One group put out an email blast inviting interested students to a Zoom meeting on the subject.

Many of the attendees were familiar faces. But one, who joined the call under a pseudonym and left his camera off, made organizers wary. He said he was an undergraduate but offered little else by way of introduction. After some prodding, he messaged one of the organizers his CSU email address, which contained his last name: Fuerst. The organizers shut down the meeting, then reconvened among themselves. They had been infiltrated. If Fuerst knew they were going after Pesta, then Pesta himself surely also knew.

But across the country, geneticists at other universities had set in motion institutional processes focused not on Pesta’s racist claims but on his violation of the norms and regulations of academe.

He had already been on one geneticist’s radar when “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability” was published in Psych.

Luke Miller (a pseudonym) is an early-career scientist who has long been rankled by racial hereditarians. As a geneticist, he said, he feels a responsibility to combat the harm done by the fringes of the scientific community. (The Chronicle has used a pseudonym for Miller and left some other early-career researchers in this article unnamed because they fear professional repercussions.) [...]

More alarmingly, the paper cited data from the National Institutes of Health’s Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP). The federal agency has strict controls governing who may use its data and how. It struck Miller as improbable that the NIH had given Pesta’s paper the green light, or would have even given him access to the data, if the agency had known what he planned to do with it.

Miller was tapped into a network of researchers across the country who felt similarly about hereditarianism. Together, four of them combed the methodology section of Pesta’s article and compiled evidence that he had violated NIH policies.

According to the paper’s methodology section, the data was uploaded to at least two servers: the Michigan Imputation Server, a University of Michigan program that deduces genes that haven’t been included in a sample; and HIrisPlex-S, a web application that deduces phenotypes like eye, hair, and skin color from genetic data. While only Pesta received permission to use the NIH data, and named none of his co-authors in the requests, Miller said he and the other whistle-blowers had inferred that others would have had to have access to it to do the analysis the paper described. [...]

Taylor works on an NIH-backed project called the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. His work uses genetic data from across ethnicities to look at risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The painstaking approval processes he and his colleagues must go through — applying for IRB approval for every study, taking yearly refresher courses on the ethics of using human subjects, and signing data-use agreements — is “cumbersome in many ways,” he said.

”We complain about it to each other as well, but it’s necessary,” he added. Such safeguards in human research came about because of past abuses that poisoned many people’s faith in medical research. They’re designed to ensure that scientists don’t use subjects’ personal information in ways they would find abhorrent.

The letter set a June 2021 deadline for the university to destroy all initially approved copies of the genetic data and find out whether any unapproved copies of the data had been made. The agency also revoked Pesta’s permission to use NIH data for any existing projects, and banned him from obtaining any NIH data for the next three years. [...]

According to a letter sent to Pesta by the then provost, Laura Bloomberg — who has since been tapped as CSU’s president — the university confirmed the NIH’s findings. It also found Pesta had lied to a staff member in CSU’s research office when he said the data would be kept in a university-owned laptop and he would be the only one with access.

Pesta said he had requested and received approval from both Cleveland State and the NIH to store the data on a home computer.

“Those bastards totally ignored me when I pointed it out,” he added.

Bloomberg ultimately found that Pesta’s conduct had damaged the university’s reputation and could impede other professors’ ability to do research.

Cleveland State declared that Pesta had been incompetent or dishonest in teaching or scholarship; neglected his duty, and engaged in personal conduct that substantially impaired the fulfillment of his institutional responsibilities; and interfered with the normal operations of the university. The letter declared Bloomberg’s decision to fire Pesta.

Pesta was officially fired on March 4, 2022, two and a half years after his article was published.

etc.

Due to some issues I haven't had the opportunity to engage with the HBD/PNH discussion or indeed to read themotte recently.

That reads like satire, but only a hack would actually name the chief commissar "O’Brien."

And there are people who will look you in the eye and not just defend this behavior, but threaten you for questioning it. Vile.

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