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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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You will have to forgive me but I'm not able to read what you are writing without it coming across to me as rather confusing and incoherent. If you could clarify for me that would be great.

It's the phenotypic null hypothesis, not the environmental null hypothesis.

I don't understand the contention. The point I was making is that the PNH expresses itself in the same way as environmentalist priors. If you believe there is infinite room for enviromentalist theory crafting without holding environmental explanatons to the same standard when it comes to genetic theory crafting then it doesn't matter what you call it. It's always the case that the other side 'could' be wrong and that their assumptions and priors are inaccurate and that there is a hidden factor they could be overlooking that could make them all wrong. What I am trying to tease out here is why you believe that this sort of rigor is some sort of guillotine for HBD'ers but not all the other fields that find no issue ignoring competing hypothesis when attributing their findings as pieces of evidence for their preferred theory.

There are various things that can be done to reduce the problems. For instance in the case of homophobia and mental illness, you can look at environmentla correlations rather than looking at genetic correlations (though that requires good measurement).

I am lost as to what you are trying to say in relation to what I wrote. You don't seem to be answering the question of why any assumption of a genetic cause needs to exclude every single possible environmental cause before it can assert itself as a contender or a piece of evidence that fits into a larger theory of how things work. Why is this a problem for HBD'ers?

From the other comment of yours:

What does the biological null hypothesis say?

That the originary primary and ultimate driver for all behavior and expressions of a biological organism in an environment is their genetic material.

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