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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31993 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Anyone have any examples of an employee union that improves business for both employees and employer?

The most salient feature of unions that I know about is that they prevent the employer from firing bad employees, or promoting good employees over ones with seniority. This makes sense to me because unions get their power/support from employees that need the union more than the employer needs them i.e. bad ones. A prototypical example of the leftist high-low alliance.

But there's no reason it has to be this way. It's technically possible for a union to say "fire bad employees, promote some faster than others, but pay us more". Is there any examples of this sort of thing working well?

First of all, unions don't prevent employers from firing bad employees or making promotion decisions based on seniority; rather, contracts do that, and only some contracts do so. Moreover, the general rule is the US is that workers can be fired at any time without cause -- i.e., at the whim of the employer. Union contracts, in contrast, permit firing only for cause. What constitutes "cause" varies, but still, here is one benefit: Those contracts not only make it more difficult to fire bad employees; they also makes it more difficult to fire a good employee who happens to get on the wrong side of a bad supervisor, or who doesn't "get with the program," even when the program is a poor one.

Let me explain in more detail.

First, it is well established that managers of companies do not always act in the best interests of the companies themselves. For that reason, giving employees the power to push back against managers can often be in the best interests of the company. See, eg, Dilbert.

Second, let's analogize with tenure in K-12 schools (which, contrary to popular belief, means only that teachers can be fired only with cause, as opposed to, as CA courts put it re teachers before they get tenure, being fired "for any reason, or for no reason.") When I taught high school, I had tenure, and hence I (and other teachers) were able to push back on all sorts of proposals by administrators which were unlikely to inure to the benefit of students (newsflash: teachers know more about their students than administrators do). Sometimes that was about budgeting -- federal law requires decisions about spending money to be made by a committee composed of administrators, teachers, and parents. Teacher representation would be pointless if teachers on the committee have to fear getting on the wrong side of the principal). Sometimes it was about the administration pushing teachers to teach how to game multiple choice tests rather than teaching real curriculum. The list goes on and on.

Now, this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do. Ditto re the analogous positions in private companies. Nevertheless, a system in which those in supervisory roles have unfettered power is unlikely to yield anything close to optimal results.

a system in which those in supervisory roles have unfettered power is unlikely to yield anything close to optimal results

Disagree, for counterexamples see every military and small business ever

Does the military get optimal results? Given how many non-officers complain about the incompetence of their superiors this seems highly unlikely. Does the US military perform well due to unfettered power from officers? or does it perform well in spite of it?

"The military" as in the current ones, disputable. It is also arguable that it is run as a true hierarchy, or answerable to e.g. a king.

Every single military historically was run this way though, and yes they got results because they won. If an alternative organizational structure produced better results, we would know about it and every military would instead have been run that way.

Every single military historically was run this way though, and yes they got results because they won. If an alternative organizational structure produced better results, we would know about it and every military would instead have been run that way.

I think you need some evidence on this. Otherwise every organization (including unions!) should follow the same logic. If there was a better organization for them we would know about it and every union would instead have been run this way. This is setting aside that many militaries do in fact lose.

For example militaries may be more efficient when divorced from civilian control. But it might not happen regardless due to other factors. We are not optimization machines. We often create and perpetuate inefficient organizations.

As an organization grows, it becomes more challenging and then impossible for a single person to keep track of what's happening. Eventually they need to receive information and give orders without a way to verify whether the information is true or the orders were carried out. Add a few more layers of this, and this is why "all organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing."

Left-wing of course is an organizational structure where low performers pledge their loyalty to managers in exchange for loot, which the managers extract from the productive parts of the organization using said loyalty. Every organization therefore experiences the same cycle: inception -> growth -> leftist takeover -> collapse.

Religion, nationalism, or any sort of ethos that unites people in service of some higher mission is social technology that prevents these last two parts.

Left-wing of course is an organizational structure where low performers pledge their loyalty to managers in exchange for loot, which the managers extract from the productive parts of the organization using said loyalty. Every organization therefore experiences the same cycle: inception -> growth -> leftist takeover -> collapse.

This is pure "boo outgroup" without even a pretense at providing evidence for your claim.

Seriously, people, actually read the rules in the sidebar. They have not changed significantly since we moved.

Is boo outgroup allowed if it's true?

For example: the behaviour of the "experts", media, government during COVID re: vaccine/lockdown skeptics, lab leak theorists was fully insane. It's now being walked back completely. A sober assessment of all of these events is extremely "boo outgroup". Are we allowed to say this stuff anyway, as long as it's in a somewhat civil way?

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Left-wing of course is an organizational structure where low performers pledge their loyalty to managers in exchange for loot, which the managers extract from the productive parts of the organization using said loyalty. Every organization therefore experiences the same cycle: inception -> growth -> leftist takeover -> collapse.

I think you will need to provide some evidence for your contention. That certainly isn't how I would define a left-wing organization, let alone "of course". There are many different organizational structures on the left from anarcho-communism through to hierarchal authoritarian communism to left-libertarianism through to neo-liberal progressive capitalism.

Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy.

Opposition to hierarchy is in the definition as per wikipedia. The force that drives these politics is a broker/manager class who profess the politics, supported by those who gain something from opposition to hierarchy i.e. those in the lower portion. Said alliance is easy to pick out in every leftist regime in history as well as on a smaller scale in organizations.

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Left-wing of course is an organizational structure where low performers pledge their loyalty to managers in exchange for loot

What makes any of that "left-wing"?

A lot, sadly. They spent over a century developing a whole ideology around it, no one else can compete

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I’ll join in the calls for Citation Needed. Passing information does not make something left-wing. Arguably, your example suggests a more reactionary, feudal structure in which the benighted peasants contract with a sovereign. It’s not a good example, given that you don’t explain how the productive end up loyal, but what should I expect from a cheap drive-by?

Also: paging that guy who wanted to prove wokeness was a religion.

Otherwise every organization (including unions!) should follow the same logic

Well, the corporations that organize and deliver the work and economic output do follow that model - one leader (ceo).

The more obvious (and moldbug) example is startups / large companies and their CEOs - they can more or less direct company operations as they will, with only advisory input from the board, and these run the entire modern economy. You can deny the US military is relatively effective, but apple? google? semiconductors?

Well, re small businesses, where is your evidence that small businesses are particularly effective? Anyhow, truly small businesses don't have principal-agent problem that I mentioned, so they are irrelevant to my argument.

As for every military, again, where is your evidence that militaries are particularly effective at what they do? Or that militaries which give have those types of power structures are more successful than those which don't? Because all the evidence I have ever seen implies the opposite. See eg this US Army manual on leadership, which repeatedly emphasizes that effective leaders need to exercise humility and to encourage candid input from subordinates.

Hierarchical organization does not exclude using feedback from subordinates or delegating decisions.

The most efficient organizations are small businesses on their way to becoming large businesses. Founders of unicorns always talk wistfully about how awesome the company was before it got too big. The least efficient organizations are the ones that have that reputation, e.g. the Toronto Transit Commission.

The common feature of organizations that suck is that they dilute accountability, both for success and failure. Within a hierarchical organization, this is not the case. Here's another example: sports teams. The best players have the most authority, and the coach has ultimate authority. It works, because if something else worked better, everyone would do that instead.

In America, sports teams are vanity projects ultimately run by billionaires who want a boost in name recognition. Their teams are exempted from anti-trust and artificially scarce, so the owners feel relatively secure they can flip their team if they run into financial problems, elsewhere, or pass it on to their children where it will retain some value. And, if those owners are bad at hiring general mangers, it’s not too much of a problem. They just need to be liked, or at least not disliked, by the other owners in their league. (Think Donald Sterling, who all the other NBA owners hated, versus Robert Sarver who just got a one year suspension and a fine, for pretty much the same offense. Not that Sarver is everyone’s favorite.)

The Sacramento Kings, New York Jets and Buffalo Sabres are all sitting on 10+ year playoff droughts in leagues with a salary cap. They and their owners will not be removed if things don’t improve.

Also, bad GMs love churning through multiple head coaches before ownership stops letting them pass the buck.

Sports teams in America are franchises of multibillion-dollar corporations.

You must be thinking of Europe. In America, sports teams make money and several are owned by large companies.

None of your complaints about how the leagues are run has anything to do with how a team operates on the field/court/ice. The coach is the sole authority, but must delegate all of the actual playing. Players are given leeway in proportion to how good they are (e.g. Auston Matthews faces less consequence for a lazy giveaway than Aston-Reese). Players are also criticized in proportion to how good they are. Everyone on the team buys into the system, they win and lose together. When the coach starts to lose the players respect or the good players start to not care about the outcome, it's a problem that needs to be fixed ASAP.

Do you think any other model could win games? If so, why hasn't it been done? How does this example not apply more generally to every organization?

Do you think any other model could win games? If so, why hasn't it been done? How does this example not apply more generally to every organization?

We’re talking about the economy, not some game where a higher power tells every firm they’re only allowed to have the exact same number of employees and set a salary cap on their wages and restrict which company employees can sign with when entering the industry and can extract concessions or prevent an employee from changing firms if an opposing firm doesn’t offer a higher guaranteed salary. It’s apples to oranges.

A team sport is "given this number of people and this equipment, do this thing better than the other team". In addition to each player being good, the team itself has to have a certain structure. Why is the right-wing hierarchical structure the only one that's ever used?

It's the most effective, and not a coincidence that rightism and affinity for team sports are linked.

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Case study: Jerry Jones.

He's fascinating because he's so good at running the team as a business (his strategic decisions on marketing the Cowboys as America's team and separating their merchandizing rights have made them the most valuable team by far even though their market, Dallas is far from the top), but he's almost equally as bad at managing the team's on the field success. It seems like the more hands on he is the more mediocre they become, even with the luck of an undrafted All-Pro QB (that should have been an enormous advantage in his first few contracts).

Dallas is a pretty good market, to be fair. It’s the fourth-largest metro in the U.S. and the top two house a pair of teams, each, where the Bears and Cowboys have nos. 3 and 4 to themselves. Also, culturally, Texas is football mad. But 💯 on your point about Jones being a savvy businessman and bungling sportsman.

The most efficient organizations are small businesses on their way to becoming large businesses.

Are they? Correct or not, "small businesses growing into large businesses" is a subset of small businesses, and a fairly small one at that.

The common feature of organizations that suck is that they dilute accountability, both for success and failure. Within a hierarchical organization, this is not the case.

Again, is this true? A lot of small businesses (where all the responsibility is on the owner-manager) suck quite badly despite concentrating accountability. Moreover, hierarchical organizations are great at diluting responsibility. This is true in both the public and private sector, though it is especially apparent the public sector. You can have a massive fuckup where everyone involved can - sincerely - say "I was just following instructions/official guidelines".

Subset of small businesses, that includes all large businesses.

The ones that suck do because their principal sucks. This does not say anything about the quality of the organizational structure.

hierarchical organizations are great at diluting responsibility...especially apparent the public sector.

I disagree. The public sector is the counterexample of hierarchy. If a superior can't fire his subordinates, it is not a hierarchical organization.

A large business is by definition not a small business.

The ones that suck do because their principal sucks. This does not say anything about the quality of the organizational structure.

What does this mean?

The public sector is the counterexample of hierarchy. If a superior can't fire his subordinates, it is not a hierarchical organization.

You're going to lay out what you mean by 'hierarchical' then, because it clearly has some disjunction from the common usage. In particular, the above would exclude militaries, which you previously praised.

Disobeying orders in the military is called insubordination. The penalty ranges from death (historically, maybe still in some places) to a court-martial. This is functionally the same as firing.

I disagree. The public sector is the counterexample of hierarchy. If a superior can't fire his subordinates, it is not a hierarchical organization.

I worked in the public sector for most of my career and I fired a good number of people. Again you are using far too wide a brush. The public sector of the whole world is far too broad a category for you to be making these statements which are then trivially disproved.

Historic kings needed to consider and encourage candid input from their advisors too! That didn't mean they didn't have 'absolute power'.

At least as regards the military, this is incredibly wrong. Not sure about the present day, but there's LOADS of scholarship out there about how the empowerment of individual soldiers to exercise discretion in how to achieve set objectives has been exceedingly important throughout the conflicts of the 20th century (auftragstaktik, British/Indian "Chindit" tactics, U.S. Marine "Distributed Operations"/"Combined Action Program", USN "Command by Negation," etc.)

Delegation is not the same thing as insubordination. Good leaders know when to listen to their employees or let them do their own thing.

Could you expand on this, because this seems contrary to my observation and intuition? The best militaries tend to be the ones that empower NCOs and enlisted and treat them well (conversely, the intensely hierarchical nature of militaries makes it easy for performance/morale-degrading abuses by leadership to go ignored/unnoticed/suppressed). Likewise, many (if not most) small businesses are terribly run, with leadership as a single point of failure.

First, it is well established that managers of companies do not always act in the best interests of the companies themselves.

Very true. For example, managers are well known to keep workers who should be fired - either to maintain their "empire" or just because it's socially uncomfortable to fire people they've formed relationships with.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/real-dev.stlouisfed.org/wp/2005/2005-040.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w3556 https://pure.eur.nl/en/publications/cultural-influences-on-employee-termination-decisions-firing-the-

Similarly, managers - as employees themselves - are incentivized to minimize accountability and maximize their own compensation.

How do unions counteract this, in either the general case or even in specific cases like education?

were able to push back on all sorts of proposals by administrators which we disliked and rationalized as being unlikely to inure to the benefit of students (newsflash: teachers know more about their students than administrators do).

Fixed that for you. Sure is convenient that teaching methods teachers find boring (phonics, direct instruction) are bad for students and all the studies showing otherwise are wrong.

“For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences.

https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/

Fixed that for you. Sure is convenient that teaching methods teachers find boring (phonics, direct instruction) are bad for students and all the studies showing otherwise are wrong

  1. As it happens, I liked the administrators in question. THAT"S THE POINT: The nature of any organization is that agents, such as school administrators, often are incentivized to act in a manner not conducive to the mission of the organization, even if they are perfectly reasonable, ethical persons.

  2. Also as it happens, I support the teaching of phonics. But, that is irrelevant to my comments, because, as I noted, I taught high school, not elementary school. I am really not sure why you feel a need to personalize this issue.

  3. I note also that you ignored the specific examples I gave, such as pressure to teach how to game standardized tests, and pressure to rubber stamp principals' funding priorities.

  4. Note also that I EXPLICITY said: " this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do." Why you think that citing evidence that that is true is somehow a "gotcha" is beyond me.

As it happens, I liked the administrators in question. THAT"S THE POINT: The nature of any organization is that agents, such as school administrators, often are incentivized to act in a manner not conducive to the mission of the organization,

Here's the most I can make out of your reasoning:

  1. Agents don't necessarily act in the best interest of the principal.

  2. ...

  3. A second set of agents will somehow fix or improve things.

Can you fill in (2)? The closest you come is "teachers know more about their students than administrators do", but you now seem to be backing away from this claim.

If you're not claiming the second set of agents is somehow better aligned with principals, what are you claiming? Or maybe you aren't claiming (3) at all?

such as pressure to teach how to game standardized tests, and pressure to rubber stamp principals' funding priorities.

Ok. I'll bite.

Teaching the mechanics of testing along with techniques for ballparking and figuring out certain answers are definitely wrong is not an unreasonable demand. I know there's a claim that "teaching to the test" somehow involves techniques that don't convey the material, but in the rare occasions someone has shown me what it actually involves it's mostly teaching the actual curriculum instead of whatever the teacher feels like.

If you want to argue this claim of mine, a great way to do so would be to a real high stakes standardized test from CA or NY and explain the mechanics of getting students to do well on this test without also learning the material well. A bad way would be saying the words "teaching to the test" or "game the test" with no specifics.

Teachers have no demonstrated ability to be administrators or competent stewards of funds, so I don't know why I should care what they think about funding priorities.

I discussed #2 at some length.

Yes, teaching how to game the test is not utterly devoid of value. But that is a red herring. The issue is whether teaching that, in lieu of teaching substantive material, is in the best interests of students. It certainly is in the best interests of administrators, which is why it was pushed. And it is why,as I discussed re #2, it was valuable to students that rules making it hard to fire me were a good thing,as they allowed me to continue to teach substantive material.

Btw, I am not talking about "teaching to test," which refers to teaching only the material that will be on the test. I am talking about teaching how to game the test.

I discussed #2 at some length.

No, you mentioned things teachers unions do. You did not explain how they improve decision making or benefit students in aggregate. If you're merely claiming that in at least one case they do (but might be negative value in aggregate), I don't disagree with that claim.

Yes, teaching how to game the test is not utterly devoid of value. But that is a red herring. The issue is whether teaching that, in lieu of teaching substantive material

If what you describe actually exists and takes a non-trivial amount of time, that would be bad. Can you please explain how to actually do this for a real standardized test in one of the 10 largest US states which was given in the last 10 years? I claim that it's not possible, except for some very trivial stuff that doesn't take much time such as "if you can rule out 2 choices out of 4, select one of the remainder at random."

I've had people tell me a few theories about how this might happen when I press the issue, but on the rare occasion they don't refuse to be specific, googling actual standardized tests suggests that their theories are impossible. Would you care to provide mechanics, as well as a link to the specific standardized test on which you think it works?

We were asked to spend about a week on that exact sort of stuff. I don't have all the details on what was in the proposed curriculum because I threw it away. And I never claimed that it worked.

Here is another example. CA has history content standards, and history analysis standards, including:

Students distinguish valid arguments from fallacious arguments in historical interpretations.

Students identify bias and prejudice in historical interpretations.

Students evaluate major debates among historians concerning alternative interpretations of the past, including an analysis of authors' use of evidence and the distinctions between sound generalizations and misleading oversimplifications.

Students construct and test hypotheses; collect, evaluate, and employ information from multiple primary and secondary sources; and apply it in oral and written presentations.

The analysis standards are not tested on state tests, or at least they were not when I was teaching. Principals, whose jobs depend on how students perform on state tests, have an incentive to push teachers to ignore the thinking standards and focus on the content standards, esp memorization etc (it is impossible to do both, given the size of the standards and the time needed to teach analysis skills). It is in the interests of students that a teacher need not fear being fired for focusing instead on the analysis standards.

Principals, whose jobs depend on how students perform on state tests, have an incentive...[to do things that]...I never claimed...worked.

I'm pretty confused here. Principals push you to do things that don't improve performance on tests because...they are incentivized to improve performance on tests?

On the flip side:

I don't have all the details on what was in the proposed curriculum because I threw it away.

we also have teachers refusing to teach the curriculum they are assigned.

It is in the interests of students that a teacher need not fear being fired for focusing instead on the analysis standards.

At least it is if you assume some random teacher knows better about what students should learn than the semi-democratically chosen school officials who created the curriculum and decided what was important enough to be on the tests.

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I think both are definitely possible if you are teaching gifted kids who could ace the standards without even trying. And the analysis standards are impossible to teach to below average kids anyway. So, why even bother trying?

The only real issue is trying to teach to a mixed proficiency group or teaching mildly above average children who could maybe learn a bit of the analysis standards at the cost of their test scores.

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The issue is whether teaching that, in lieu of teaching substantive material, is in the best interests of students. It certainly is in the best interests of administrators, which is why it was pushed. And it is why,as I discussed re #2, it was valuable to students that rules making it hard to fire me were a good thing,as they allowed me to continue to teach substantive material.

This is all kind of silly. First, it's remarkable to hang your hat on "best interest of the students" in the immediate wake of the teacher's unions utterly fucking their students for their own benefit over covid. Second, if this problem of "teachers not being allowed to teach substantiative material" is a general structural problem, then that's a damning indictment of the entire public school system, and we should be moving to the "burn it all down" part of the discussion, which would still involve abolishing the existing union as a part of the corrupt status quo.

I am talking about teaching how to game the test.

Curious as to what this means. It takes like 5 minutes to explain, e.g., the logic of when to guess on the SATs.

First, it's remarkable to hang your hat on "best interest of the students" in the immediate wake of the teacher's unions utterly fucking their students for their own benefit over covid.

As I explicitly said in my initial post, "Now, this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do"

Second, if this problem of "teachers not being allowed to teach substantitive material" is a general structural problem, then that's a damning indictment of the entire public school system,

I don't know why you infer that it is a general structural problem. It was simply a single example of how principal-agent problems can sometimes crop up. And, btw, I guarantee you that it is not a problem unique to public schools. Private school administrators if anything have an even greater incentive to generate high test scores, since they need to sell their school to prospective parents.

It takes like 5 minutes to explain, e.g., the logic of when to guess on the SATs

IF that is true, then that just strengthens my point, because we were asked to spend several days on it.

A second set of agents will somehow fix or improve things.

A principal might have more space for flourishing when existing in a conflict zone between two different agents. The principal can play the two agents against each other as opposed to being dominated by a single overpowering entity. That's true even if neither set of agents is particularly aligned with the principal.

On the other hand, the principal in question might be Poland, literally or figuratively.

In the case of employees facing unions vs employers, it's a bit of column A, a bit of column B. Both employers and unions have some level of alignment with the employee: the employer wants a productive worker (albeit at minimum cost) and has to maintain some level of happiness to avoid them switching to a competitor, and the union wants to keep its represented workers happy for fear of decert (albeit with minimal regard for the worker's career growth or more generally the long term growth of the company). This rivalry lets workers play one agent against the other, sometimes siding with the union at the expense of the employer (collective bargaining) and sometimes siding with the employer at the expense of the union (scabbing; ignoring work rules). At their best, unions push for utility increasing policies for workers at minimal cost to the worker; at their worst, they take their dues and do pretty much nothing except funnel it toward bureaucrats' salaries and political pet causes. Most of the time it's somewhere in between in the private sector, in large part depending on how easy it is to unionize (the easier, the more unions manage to extract for the worker).

Note that this is entirely speaking from the perspective of the individual worker, not society writ large.

In the teachers union example, the principal is students. Agent 1 and 2 are school administrators and teachers unions, respectively.

In the case of private sector employment, the principals are shareholders and customers, whereas agent 1 and 2 are managerial employees and ICs (possibly with the latter represented by a union).

I guess you're thinking that students can learn to read via phonics by somehow playing teachers unions against school administrators (or having their parents do so)?

Was speaking abstractly.

As far as public education goes, the issue is that there really aren't competing agents. Where they're most powerful, public sector unions don't exercise their power through competing with the employer for worker allegiance but through influencing the political process to remove their opposing agent as well as the market discipline that forces trade offs to be made. The result of that is a world where there's no accountability; if students are failing, then the issue is that the schools need more funds, which must be appropriately distributed through administrators/teachers/the union, who then use the funds to repeat the process. All the agents in public education are best thought of as a collective symbiote that has a parasitic relationship with the rest of society.

Students aren't agents here at all. Their parents might be agents, but only through the ability to vote or remove their kids from schools (which reduces funding). The political process has the latter avenue already in its sights.

First of all, unions don't prevent employers from firing bad employees or making promotion decisions based on seniority; rather, contracts do that...

Any particular type of contract with any particular group representatives negotiating them? These contracts don't just spring from the ether, fully formed, a disappointment to the union that would really prefer that they not be so. Maybe they're in the general interests of high-quality employees as well, but it's a copout to suggest that unions aren't responsible for useless employees being kept on board due to contractual arrangements.

How come you deleted the part where I said, "only some contracts do so," and that even they require only firing for cause? I am sure that SOME union contracts make it unreasonably difficult to fire bad employees, but the OP's assumption that they all do is a claim made without evidence.

Because it was entirely irrelevant to the point. Contracts that making it difficult to fire bad employees are negotiated by unions. The contract is the means to the end of making it difficult to employees, it is not the actor in the situation. The union requests such terms, not the employer. Changing the statement to there only being some unions that negotiate such contracts doesn't alter the situation that when such contracts exist, they're a product of unions that prefer such contracts.

Yes, of course it is unions which negotiate the contracts. That is not the point; the point is that the existence of a union does not, per se, imply the existence of an onerous contract provision. If the question is, to paraphrase the OP, "are unions bad," then the answer is "it depends," not, as OP implies, "Yes, because they prevent bad employees from being fired.'

OP said "Anyone have any examples of an employee union [that doesn't prevent bad employees from being fired]" and I haven't seen anyone give one

No, OP asked for "any examples of an employee union that improves business for both employees and employer?" The bracketed material in the quote completely changes the question.

These contracts don't just spring from the ether, fully formed, a disappointment to the union that would really prefer that they not be so.

MOLOCH! MOLOCH! MOLOCH!

Sometimes it was about the administration pushing teachers to teach how to game multiple choice tests rather than teaching real curriculum.

What is the difference, in your opinion, between teaching "how to game multiple choice tests" and "test-taking skills?"

The former is a pejorative term for the latter. Neither is as valuable as teaching the actual curriculum, and neither, btw,is part of any state-adopted learning standards that I have ever heard of.

contrary to what the right would have you believe, welfare is very cheap (this is where i disagree with conservatives) relative to other programs and can be done at scale, provided provisions are put in place to ensure the money is not wasted on booze and drugs. I think this is better than creating unnecessary or overpaid work that costs employers. Most union workers in the trades probably still have IQs in the 90s to low 100s range (you have to be somewhat competent to do labor and trades work), which is not low-IQ per say.

Agree: the rising IQ floor for entry level jobs is an issue worth investigating

welfare is very cheap... I think this is better than creating unnecessary or overpaid work

Disagree: welfare is a death sentence. Unnecessary work is dumb, but without purpose life is ugly. See: the blacks

See: the blacks

I now suspect that you are running some sort of false flag operation.

"Speaking plainly is bad" -Gdanning

If "speaking plainly" means expressing the opinion that "the blacks" have ugly lives without purpose, you are going to have to take heed to a few of our other rules, like not weakmanning your outgroup, speaking about individuals and not entire groups, and speaking like you want everyone to be included. You're definitely failing to be kind, and bordering on being egregiously obnoxious.

You will also cease this petty personal sniping.

Agreed. Welfare is cheap in a monetary sense... but I think we need some sort of make-work program, if only to get the masses more happy with their lives. I'm convinced the 'mental health' epidemic is a consequence of people lacking meaning in their lives.

How exactly would make-work generate meaning? Can't a person get all the benefit (or more) of make-work by like, working out? I just fail to see how any of the positive feelings people associate with a job well done or a step forward in a career path could come from a job that is essentially a placebo.

Also i find the sentiment distastefully close to "the plebs need to be reminded of their place (working, even if it is literally meaningless work) lest they become restless and uppity"

Unnecessary work is dumb, but without purpose life is ugly. See: the blacks

Rather than blacks I think your statement would be more accurate if it called out every high IQ idiot who's ever complained about "dysgenics" or "ariska" (however its spelled).

Purposelessness is a disease of the narcissist.

Simple - we stop paying for old people to eke out a few more years of life. Everyone on welfare gets X per month, if they can't pay for medical care or spend it on drugs instead of food, they die.

I am also very sympathetic to "low IQ honest workers should make a living wage," but I would do it through cutting immigration and discouraging women from working. These are the two most important factors in real wages decoupling from productivity starting in about 1970. Leftist dominated unions aren't doing much for real wages.

I agree public sector unions are a joke. They are the worst of the worst.

I would recommend the history of coal mines as a primer on whether limits to immigration and women in the workforce would suffice to make working conditions and pay reasonable in the absence of unions or regulation. While immigration does have a role in wage suppression and worker abuse, the local residents in West Virginia were exploited to such an extent that it damaged labor movements elsewhere in the country. In the absence of worker coordination, there is ample opportunity to capital to stomp on labor, even if the labor supply doesn't have the sort of surplus that immigration creates.

Anyone have any examples of an employee union that improves business for both employees and employer?

This is like asking for examples of a defence lawyer making things better for the state prosecutor (barring mistakes or incompetence). That isn't their job. The relationship is adversarial in that getting better conditions (pay, breaks etc.) for employees will generally cost X and that X is money the company could have spent elsewhere or taken as profit.

The reason unions protect bad employees is the same reason that defence lawyers defend the guilty as well as the innocent. Because the companies incentives do not necessarily align with the employees and therefore a bad employee from the companies perspective is not an objective measure. In an employer friendly location like the US, it might make sense for companies to fire employees for very little as long as the labor supply is good, but socially that may not be desirable. Also its tricky to get people to join unions if you have a reputation for throwing them under the bus when they get in trouble.

The question you should be asking is in totality taking into account employees, companies and society in general are unions an improvement or not? And that is a much trickier question to answer. It's quite possible a union could be a net good but be bad for the company itself.

Having said that unions definitely can and do soft shoe things when they are dealing with poor employees. They just can't advertise that for the above reasons. But if you deal with them you can tell. Do they go for the throat and be aggressive or do they just show up at the meeting make some notes, pat the employee on the shoulder and advise them to take the written warning etc. I've fired people while dealing with public sector and private sector unions and they do have ways of dialing back support for employees they think themselves are a problem. Which is not to say they do that all the time, but they can.

Because the companies incentives do not necessarily align with the employees

Disagree. Unless the mission is dumb, businesses fail or succeed with their employees. If the business succeeds it grows, which ends up benefitting most employees.

The public sector union would be the closest to what you've described because they as an organization can fail without (immediate) consequence. But the actions of the union are most of the reason they suck.

How does a business growing benefit its employees, assuming they don't own stock in it?

The business has to hire more people, raising the seniority and salary of most existing employees.

I have worked in at many companies in many trades, and this has never happened once ever to me or to anyone I know or anyone they know.

It is just kindof a silly thing to believe?

Like, have you ever worked retail, or construction, or tech?

Like, have you ever worked retail, or construction, or tech?

I've worked in retail and tech, and know people in construction. Generally folks want their business/location/franchise to grow because it comes with pay boosts, and opportunities for advancement. Sounds like you don't care about climbing the org ladder, but for people who do growth is crucial.

It depends on the size of the organization already. Obviously if your 20-person firm goes up to 80-person, that's good. But if you work for an international giant with a six figure workforce, it hardly matters if new locations are being established when they're on the other side of the planet.

Unless it doesn’t, and puts more work on said existing employees without increased compensation. Sure, they can go somewhere else...at which point it’s their replacement who might see benefits.

Seems like growth, contraction, and staying exactly the same are the only logical options, and staying exactly the same isn't a realistic option for any significant time period.

Under a framework that assumes companies are rational, profit-maximizing entities , the tendency of companies to resist unionization suggest this is not true. Part of the problem with unions I think is the inflexibility in the hiring and firing process, not the benefits.

But there is a huge gap between failing and being perfect. And not all companies even want to grow. Companies are not perfectly efficient or even close to it in my experience. But it is quite possible to have a business model which relies on exploiting workers in order to eke out more profit. You can also have a business which is a cooperative with all employees all being owners. But most companies are somewhere between these extremes. If you can keep replacing your employees then you can be successful even while treating your employees badly.

This is like asking for examples of a defence lawyer making things better for the state prosecutor

Not necessarily. This is how Wagner Act unions in the U.S. work, but I'm given to understand that there are more cooperative labor organization models out there that integrate labor into the entire decision-making framework of the company.

Sure, workers coops and the like can have different dynamics. But in the standard US model that is not on the cards.

The most salient feature of unions that I know about is that they prevent the employer from firing bad employees, or promoting good employees over ones with seniority.

They also allow people to negotiate over working conditions in a manner other than simply changing jobs. I slung cardboard in a FedEx unload bay in college where I was reduced to an hourly total, and their entire staffing model was to pay one tick above minimum wage and then burn through employees at whatever rate occurred. The management style was, whenever understaffed and for however many months, to tell the grunts to work yet harder. It’s very common for FedEx sort facilities to have over 100% turnover in a year on average. And, we didn’t have it Amazon bad.

It wasn’t horrible for someone like me because I knew I was out of there and on to better things in a short time. But if you’re a HBD, heritable-intelligence type, then there are going to be some folks for whom that’s their lot in life. And I’ve met a few of them. If they’re, say, loading four delivery vans at 300-400 boxes a van, and arranging boxes based on the seven-to-eight digit code that organizes the boxes along the delivery route, that’s more than honest work for one shift. I one-hundred percent want people for whom that’s their level in life to have a union say, “No, you can’t put someone on more than a four-truck pull during the holiday-season peak. You can adequately staff your shifts, or you can have management come in and start loading trucks for failing to do their job.”

A significant part of what is driving unionization pushes at places like Starbucks, Amazon, etc. are working conditions.

I completely agree that's what a union should be. But in practice why do they always spent so much of their negotiating power on protecting employees who should be fired?

Do they? Or is it that working conditions and wages are hammered out only every so-many years during contract negotiations, and that, by intent and structure, isn’t going to be something that can occur just whenever.

  1. Unions are fiercely protective of brutal employees

  2. This costs the employer a lot of money, and they would pay to remove this stipulation

"We'll let you fire some guys, but you have to pay the rest of us more" -no union leader ever

They also have to maintain solidarity. The union is an organization and the business is an organization.

When the MİT murders some mouthy Kurds in Turkey, the PKK doesn’t want the heat that a retaliatory killing is going to bring, but if they don’t offer one up every now and again they will lose support from their base.

Signaling to the rest of union members and the employer. Staking out a strong position for an incompetent worker indicates obstinate adherence to certain principles. Importantly, it makes observers think that genuinely predatory or abusive actions won't be tolerated, scaring the employer and giving assurances to members.

It has obvious costs, but it appears somewhat effective.

Work rules are, quite explicitly, something that does not improve business. It makes businesses less able to engage in process improvements, particularly since any process improvement becomes a new opportunity for employees to grab more without adding value.

Work rules are generally more harmful than just demands for more money due to this deadweight loss. As an example of this, consider port of LA workers opposing any kind of productivity increasing automation under the guise of work rules.

But there’s a place for sacrificing efficiency to prevent Amazon warehouse-like treatment. Yes, obviously the LA port workers behavior is bad and shouldn’t be encouraged. But employees should also get some way to push back against being asked to wear diapers at work.

But employees should also get some way to push back against being asked to wear diapers at work.

They do. It's called McDonald's, Walmart, or any other non-Amazon job which - according to /u/limestheif - pay more than the competition in return for demanding more from workers. This isn't some kind of monopsony-ish situation where only one employer in the state needs their specialized skillset.

You seem to want to eliminate the opportunity to work harder and get more money for those that want it, I guess cause you know better than they do or something.

(I'm ignoring the fact that the diaper story is mostly FUD based on exaggerations/universalization about a problem that happens to many older adults.)

Right. The efficiency engineers at Amazon didn’t have any business incentive to budget in time to allow people to walk the distance required to urinate in a bathroom when picking orders. The plan was, pay $15-18 an hour when that was above most other entry level jobs and the labor market was weaker, and replace anyone who places a higher price on their dignity. The end result is ultimately people on the line pissing in bottles. The union does not exist to make the business efficient. It exists to give current employees bargaining power, where they’d otherwise be on the short end of an imbalance.

In your specific case of cardboard wrangling, couldn't those who wanted a more stable union job doing the exact same thing have gone across the street to UPS instead of FedEx?

Well, not everyone, no. Maybe if UPS was opening a brand new sort facility in that area. But a few, sure.

I don't know what American unions or American employers are like, so let's get that out of the way first.

Okay, now let me say that I'm fed-up of union bashing. Any employment I had where I got decent pay and conditions was down to unions. Any non-union workplaces where I was employed screwed over their staff, because what are you gonna do, get the union involved? Ha ha, no union here!

So I'm pro-union all the way.

I was in a member of CUPE in during my chemistry PhD. The leadership wanted to strike in my second year so I went to the meeting to vote against it. The open mic session sounded like a DSA convention. Just a big line of antifa-looking dweebs complaining about how they are being taken advantage of, even though each of them signed the deal to do this less than 5 years ago and the terms hadn't changed. It boiled down to arts students in departments where graduate outnumbered undergrad and they weren't getting enough TA hours. So they used the rest of us, who were happy but needed by the university (science, engineering, etc) to eventually get subsidized. In the middle of the leftist speeches, a compsci student got on the mic and said "if I've already completed all my hours for this semester, will I still get paid if you guys strike?". Nobody even knew, it was perfect. We then got to do the same song and dance 2 years later, which luckily didn't pass.

Aside from that, the union implemented some classic leftist policies. They made it so that professors were not allowed to use TA reviews to determine assignments, and there was a strict order of seniority that had to be used.

My experience lines up with everything I've heard from others who have been in unions. I was just wondering whether some counterexamples existed.

It boiled down to arts students in departments where graduate outnumbered undergrad

is this really a thing? what could they possibly need so many grad students for?

HR and DEI at your workplace. They draw from a highly educated unskilled pool of workers. And then I get mandatory training about how gaslighting and microagressions need to be proactively resisted in the workplace.

Mostly money. From the administrators' point of view it's all about the tuition fees. And not just for the masters students, in some humanities programmes even the PhD students have to pay.

From the professors' point of view, postgraduates help support their supervisors' research, plus they're much more interesting to work with than undergrads.

Humanities grad students mostly go on to become commissars

Tuition revenue.

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When unions manage to make the news in the US, it's normally for things like police unions protecting their own after a bad shoot or various teacher's unions refusing to return to teaching in-person classes. It skews a lot of US perceptions of what benefits unions actually provide.

Supposedly German unions use apprenticeship systems and generally produce a minimum level of quality.

That purported role is frequently filled by occupational licensing and unreasonable education requirements in the US (e.g. college degrees for daycare) which serve the same "protect our jobs from competition/give us more money" role that unions do.

Some of these are 'hard' cartels, like doctors who meticulously prevent competition by limiting med school and residency places

Do you have any evidence that doctors actually lobby for the limitation of med school and residency places? I've heard this claim several times here, but never any evidence to back it up. Some quick googling led me to contrary evidence.

In other countries doctors have done much worse at creating labor cartels; the UK is flooded with a continuous supply of doctors from Southern Europe, Africa, India and so on, which is why salaries for doctors are 1/4 or less of what they are in the US.

See also discussions about how medical costs in the US are unreasonably high, and we should reduce them to UK levels. That can only be done by reducing employee compensation to UK levels.

But some blue collar professions, particularly in the Germanic countries, have arguably done better.

Germany due to culture just seems to value high quality labor a lot.

Apprenticeship infinitely better than education, I support this

I don't have an example of a union doing that, but there are examples of what unions should be doing good things.

Unions only exist because there are laws that force employers to negotiate with them. Absent those laws, a coalition of workers looks a lot more like a temp agency or a contracting shop. I have had good experiences working for such agencies: they find jobs, they test your skills once and then vouch for you with employers so you don't have to re-interview all the time, they negotiate with the employer on your behalf, etc. The difference is that the employer is not forced to hire only employees from that agency, so the agency is kept honest. There are obviously benefits to the employer to such an arrangement because it's totally voluntary and they still choose it over direct hiring.

Unions only exist because there are laws that force employers to negotiate with them.

100% true, just like DEI only exists because of the civil rights act.

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.

Reliance on the "phenotypical null hypothesis" is uninteresting, and really I find the name to be ridiculous as it is just simply asserting an unearned null hypothesis status. It's the same kind of critique that the possibility that we're actual brains in a vat means I can't be certain about measurements during woodworking. Sure, granted. But you understand that this doesn't actually impact policy discussion right? I don't need proof against solipsism to accurately measure a cut of wood and I don't need a unified theory of genetic determinism to find out that the policy proposals of blank slatists fail in every conceivable way and we should stop listening to their batshit theories. Maybe there is some allergen with a simple intervention that will equalize all populations on average on IQ tests and achieve racial achievement equity and I'll celebrate that discovery more than you can image, but you don't get to call it a null hypothesis when literally no evidence has ever pointed to it being true.

I forget who exactly said it but there was a comment from a long term regular in another HBD thread from a couple weeks back to the effect of "the problem with the high degree of overlap between parentage and culture is that it gives people evidence to falsely claim that culture matters more than genetics."

It seems to me that the inverse is equally true. That the high degree of overlap between parentage and culture is that it gives people evidence to falsely claim that genetics matters more than culture.

Is cultural intervention honestly any more palatable than genetic pessimism to the opponents of hbd? Stop doing damage to society and you can examine the issue at your leisure. But if you're going to impose large costs on me and mine you need to have real receipts.

But also, that groups vary in average just trivially follows from the idea that different individuals can vary on the same measures. Any randomly selected group will vary to some degree just due to internal variance and it takes very little selective pressure to make that variance larger. It would require some kind of miracle for groups that were isolated for thousands of years to not vary somewhat and then we're just haggling on price.

Is cultural intervention honestly any more palatable than genetic pessimism to the opponents of hbd?

I'm not sure what exactly what you're asking here. But if you're asking whether I think having a common culture/values matters more to building healthy communities racial homogeneity? or do I believe that growing up in a middle-class two-parent household has a greater effect on a child's life outcomes than the melanin content of their skin? the answer is "Yes, Absolutely."

You are of course aware we are able to control for being raised middle class and having a two-parent household, correct? I think you know what I mean by cultural intervention, are the opponents of HBD wiling to tell underperforming groups that they are raising their kids wrong and need to be forced to change how they raise their kids? Not that I would support this even if it would work, it would be a monstrous thing. But that's what you mean by a culture explanation right?

You are of course aware we are able to control for being raised middle class and having a two-parent household, correct?

I am aware, the question is are you?

Am I aware of what? That your proposed examples are baked in already? why would this support your position?

Essentially what @PutAHelmetOn said, by controlling for factors that are not genetics you are effectively baking the assumption that genetics is the primary causal factor into your study.

As for whether the cultural explanation is "monstrous" well that's one of the fundamental points of disagreement between the blue tribe and the red.

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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?

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I believe he means that the socially-acceptable alternative to HBD is not cultural explanations, and the socially-acceptable alternative to any solutions HBD might imply is not changing the culture of the group with the poor outcomes. Rather, it's "blame and punish whitey".

Firstly, "socially acceptable" to whom? Secondly, what of it?

I believe that if you were to ask the median conservative or a middle-class black person about achievement gaps, black criminality, collapse of black-owned businesses/neighborhoods over the last 60 years, or any of the other negative trends that HBDists like to blame on genetics, that their response would be something about the "crisis of black fatherhood".

However you're unlikely to hear anything about this in blue-aligned spaces (be they libertarian, progressive, or reactionary) because acknowledging it calls a number of deeply held blue-tribe beliefs about personal emancipation, internal vs external loci of control, collective vs individual guilt, the role of the nuclear family (or lack there of) into question.

Journalists and academia. They're not 50% conservaties. What your median conservatives says is irreleveant

Journalists and academia.

and what "Journalists and academia" say is relevant somehow?

Firstly, "socially acceptable" to whom?

To the group which is in power and controls the Overton window.

Secondly, what of it?

If the explanation is not socially acceptable, remedies which rely on the explanation being true will not be socially acceptable either, and therefore will not be implemented. So the problem will remain and will continue to be blamed on whitey.

Do you genuinely believe that any one group actually controls the overton window?

Sounds to me like you're choosing to be blamed.

I've seen SAT scores broken out by race and income that suggests income is less predictive.

Perhaps academic achievement is less culturally valued in the gaps.

Have there been any successful interventions promoting 2-parent households?

Blacks had better family formation in the past, prior to the sexual revolution, so it's the other way around but amounts to the same thing. We do in fact know that blacks as a population can actually form stable families, because we've seen them do it. yes, there was still a gap between the best outcomes we've observed for blacks and the best outcomes we've observed for whites, but we also observe that gaps between whites and Jews and Asians don't actually cause problems by themselves absent aggressive race-baiting. It's at least a plausible route to laying race to rest.

They can, but in current year they don't.

Have there been any successful interventions promoting 2-parent households?

Depends on how you define "successful intervention" the problem being that cultural interventions are effectively monstrous in the eyes of the blue tribe and thus there is a vested interest within academia to undermine and denying any success.

cultural interventions are effectively monstrous in the eyes of the blue tribe

Do you mean cultural interventions promoting stability and 'tradition'? That tribe seems all-in on interventions promoting alphabet people or degeneracy.

As for defining success, improved performance of family formation where the children are born to married parents where everyone lives in the home and at least one parent works in gainful employment. No extra-marital births to either adult could be a 'stretch' goal.

Do you have a graph comparing the educational outcomes of middle-class two-parent black Americans to non-middle-class non-two-parent Jewish-Americans?

I'm not an HBDist.

I believe that growing up in a middle-class two-parent household has a greater effect on a child's life outcomes than

Because you don't have evidence, it looks like "I believe that growing up in a middle-class two-parent household has a greater effect on a child's life outcomes than" is based on faith

I suspect it's got a lot more evidence both observational and academic than your nebulous claims about group differences in IQ do.

Growing in two-parent household isn't an independent variable. Earlier, a parent might die to war or natural causes, or slave master moved them to another location. Now, in rich 1 st world countries, living with 1 parent is usually because one or both parents are bad at impulse control (assholes), which is correlated with intelligence and anything.

That is not a rebuttal.

But if you're going to impose large costs on me and mine you need to have real receipts.

Actually you just need to have a sufficient majority of the voters or people in positions at power in the institutions that make decisions about what costs to bear in order to create equality. Most political decisions do not seem to be very informed by science.

I'd offer a third take: it's likely that the high degree of overlap between parentage and culture is due to the mutual influence each has upon the other, over time, to the point that there are very good reasons it's difficult to tease the two apart.

Genetics shapes culture. If a group has a higher than normal tendency to reclusiveness, or aggression, or neuroticism, or quantitative ability, etc., then if the resulting society is to be successful, it must shape its institutions to both offset the negative impacts of that tendency as well as guide the positive aspects in a productive direction. Successful institutions must deal with people as they exist, not as anyone wishes them to be.

Culture shapes genetics. Culture is what determines status, and status heavily influences who has an easier time contributing his genes to the next generation.

Overall, I'd say the blank-slatists are trivially wrong, and the HBDers are directionally correct, but that it's unfortunately easy to overstate one's case.

My father retired from thirty years at a job which I intuitively understood before I was ever hired there under him. My mother and I both do desktop publishing. Our family’s favorite game is Perquackey, the Scrabble-style dice game, and we each have a copy. None of us have Scrabble.

Brain genes are remarkable.

Certainly. I can take a look at my immediate family, and link up all sorts of similarities in terms of likes/dislikes, talents, emotional reactivity, communication style, etc. It's just that this sort of observation can't really separate nature vs. nurture when you're linked by both genes and experience.

Though once you've gone through the massive stack of adoption studies, twin studies, everything-we're-allowed-to-do-ethically studies, etc., you find that both matter a lot.

There's a pattern in the interaction that I suspect is very common. Take height as an example. Your maximum potential height is genetically determined, full stop. But your actual height as a fraction of that potential is environmentally determined--did you get adequate nutrition as a child? Did your legs get amputated in a car accident?

That said, this is more examining individual cases and family clusters, rather than the trends of population genetics.

As far as I know, twin and adoption studies consistently show that genetics matter much more than parenting in causing differences between people. So the HBD-aligned people are right about that part.

Of course "does genetics or parenting matter more for causing differences between people" is not the only nature-nurture question of interest, and behavior genetic methods might not be viable for other questions, or might require adjustments to the biometric numbers to be applicable.

Reliance on the "phenotypical null hypothesis" is uninteresting

Is the goal to be interesting or to figure out the truth?

and really I find the name to be ridiculous as it is just simply asserting an unearned null hypothesis status

It's not unearned, it's a fundamental property of heritability that it transfers through phenotypic causality, and there's lots of phenotypic causality to go through.

It's the same kind of critique that the possibility that we're actual brains in a vat means I can't be certain about measurements during woodworking.

No, the phenotypic null hypothesis agrees that the measurements work, it just points out something about what they mean.

But you understand that this doesn't actually impact policy discussion right? I don't need proof against solipsism to accurately measure a cut of wood and I don't need a unified theory of genetic determinism to find out that the policy proposals of blank slatists fail in every conceivable way and we should stop listening to their batshit theories.

I understand that the phenotypic null hypothesis is not a knockdown argument against HBD, and that it is not meant to be. Instead it covers the validity of various types of arguments.

Like if HBDers keep using argument that are invalid due to the phenotypic null hypothesis, and they refuse to learn about the phenotypic null hypothesis, then surely critics of HBD are in the right in dismissing HBDers as clueless about behavior genetics. You can't expect anti-HBDers to want to spend infinite time knocking down nonsense arguments. (Of course that point is symmetric - anti-HBDers also often come up with nonsense.)

Maybe there is some allergen with a simple intervention that will equalize all populations on average on IQ tests and achieve racial achievement equity and I'll celebrate that discovery more than you can image, but you don't get to call it a null hypothesis when literally no evidence has ever pointed to it being true.

The null hypothesis isn't about race differences in IQ, it's about within-population heritability in all sorts of things.

A few days ago, I made a comment defending Turkheimer and critizing HBDers, in response to a vaulted "best of" comment dismissing 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.

In response to your comment, @DaseindustriesLtd already shared proof that Turkheimer confessed to being epistemically irrational about HBD:

And because whatever the faults of HBDers, the other side remains epistemologically worse. Turkheimer may have some legitimate scientific argument against between-group genetic diffs on g; his bottom line was still arrived at through moralizing. «We can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.»

You did not respond to that allegation. Why should we waste time sorting through the pilpul of a confessed propagandist if we are in any way interested in epistemics, as you purport to be?

Let me also cut through what feels like a lot of unnecessary argumentation and simply ask you this: how can you explain the correlation between cognitive skills and genetic closeness depicted in this figure without acknowledging substantial genetic heritability? How is any sort of null hypothesis even necessary with this kind of direct evidence in hand?

Let me also cut through what feels like a lot of unnecessary argumentation and simply ask you this: how can you explain the correlation between cognitive skills and genetic closeness depicted in this figure without acknowledging substantial genetic heritability?

Yes, when you control for factors X, Y and Z, whatever remains is going to be what shows up on the graph. That is what "controlling for" means. Where HBD-tards drop the ball is the transition form "things like height, athletics ability, show high degrees of heritability" to "judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

  • -25

Where HBD-tards drop the ball is the transition form "things like height, athletics ability, show high degrees of heritability" to "judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

Can you name any specific HBD-tards?

I am not aware of any HBD believer/tolerant people who say "a 7 foot tall white man who never misses free throws should be banned from the NBA" or "a black teenager with perfect SATs who won the math olympiad should be rejected from Caltech". Can you cite some of them?

Can you name any specific HBD-tards?

A handful in this forum but I'm already in the dog house with the mods.

  • -10

Lol I totally believe you that they exist, but you just can't link to them cause "the mods".

Speaking as a mod, there certainly are people with those beliefs on this forum, but no, it is not encouraged to call people out by name as examples of "People who believe shitty things."

But "HBD-tards" do not advocate for this generally. As is constantly stated, HBD is most commonly used as an alternative to a racism of the gaps.

Not "generally", only when they are forced to retreat from the bailey to the motte. Hence the derision aimed towards "blank-slatists" and the like.

  • -10

If this is so I only care about the motte, if you find me outside of it feel free to let me know. But it really does not seem like people are willing to grant the motte.

Where HBD-tards drop the ball is the transition form "things like height, athletics ability, show high degrees of heritability" to "judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

That wasn't remotely the topic of conversation.

The answer is the same though.

  • -15

"judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

This is a gross mischaracterization of the HBD position and you know it. I, and every other HBD supporter I know of in the rationalist community supports judging individual people by their actual qualities. The only difference is that we don't expect such judgements to find exactly equal distributions of talent in each race.

I have literally never seen a rationalist HBD supporter who argues that a demonstrably talented individual should be denied opportunity because of their race

This is a gross mischaracterization

No, it is not a gross mischaracterization. It is the bailey in contrast to the motte. I have had arguments whicthn users in this very thread about how equality before the law is not the same thing as fungibility.

HBD-tards

Don't do this. Straight-up calling your opponents retards is not how arguments work here and you know it.

If "HBD" now also has to include the extreme weakman positions of people who just want a scientific fig-leaf for racist blanket dismissal (of badly-performing groups), is there any group identification you are okay with the people like me who don't hold those positions? I genuinely believe that intelligence is heritable, there are significant differences in averages between groups and want to judge people by their individual qualities and find any policy that treats people differential based on race or ethnicity to be morally highly unpalatable. Do you not believe me that these are my positions, or do you just think that I am not allowed to hold these without taking responsibility for any cover this might give to people who believe in the first two but not the second two?

You did not respond to that allegation. Why should we waste time sorting through the pilpul of a confessed propagandist if we are in any way interested in epistemics, as you purport to be?

I am not aware of any epistemic rules which say that you can't use moral judgements to decide whether something is silly or ugly.

Let me also cut through what feels like a lot of unnecessary argumentation and simply ask you this: how can you explain the correlation between cognitive skills and genetic closeness depicted in this figure without acknowledging substantial genetic heritability? How is any sort of null hypothesis even necessary with this kind of direct evidence in hand?

I agree that they are heritable. Turkheimer also agrees that they are heritable.

  • -10

I didn't interpret Turkheimer as judging it ugly rather than true on moral grounds, I interpreted him as judging it ugly rather than silly or unobjectionable on moral grounds.

"because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair"

What do you make of that then? Suppose the Catholic Church said "it is a matter of ethnical principle that the sun revolves around the Earth." No further arguments they made for geocentrism would be epistemically interesting. We shouldn't trust anything they say on the topic. Once someone confesses to being uninterested in the pursuit of truth, indeed to being the enemy of the truth conditional on its content, it's folly to engage with them for the purpose of pursuing the truth.

In sum: Turkheimer is a propagandist on this topic, he admitted as much, and it's a waste of time to engage with his arguments on the topic if you have any interest in finding the truth.

I have already read his point about the phenotypic null hypothesis, so your argument can't exactly persuade me to un-read it, whatever that would mean. And having read it, I've come to the conclusion that it's a critically important point for understanding heritability. Reading his paper and understanding his argument screens off whichever virtue or vice he might have.

Reading and understanding these arguments takes significant investment. So we need to use some manner of rational principle to decide which arguments are worth the investment to understand and engage with. That the argument is endorsed by Eric Turkheimer (a confessed propagandist) and @tailcalled (from my perspective, a random and unknown internet person who describes him or herself on Twitter as an autistic hobbyist gender researcher) does not come close to surmounting the threshold of reputability that it would take to persuade me to engage with it.

Just as physicists are loathe to engage with (and likely debunk) random cranks who come bearing plans for perpetual motion machines, and number theorists are loathe to engage with (and likely debunk) random cranks who come bearing new schemes for cryptography, no one should feel compelled to spend the investment that it takes to engage with (and likely debunk) whatever latest wad of argumentative complexity Turkheimer has concocted to further his political end. The fact that you personally vouch for it means nothing to me.

One productive step you could take if you want people to engage with the argument is to do the work of simplifying the argument to the point where it doesn't take significant investment to understand it. Boil it down to a couple of sentences with a simple toy model, and explain how it analogizes back to the original claim. But your whole method of repeatedly posting to the front page "here's a link to a paper from a confessed liar, go do a ton of homework to understand it if you want to consider yourself rational" is just one iteration of a gish gallop.

One productive step you could take if you want people to engage with the argument is to do the work of simplifying the argument to the point where it doesn't take significant investment to understand it. Boil it down to a couple of sentences with a simple toy model, and explain how it analogizes back to the original claim. But your whole method of repeatedly posting to the front page "here's a link to a paper from a confessed liar, go do a ton of homework to understand it if you want to consider yourself rational" is just one iteration of a gish gallop.

What's wrong with the toy model I gave in my article, of education? That genes affect intelligence which affect exam completion which affect education?

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This is exactly the conclusion I came to as well. tailcalled seems more interested in obfuscating and claiming we can't know anything than clarifying and getting closer to the truth (despite occasional protestations of the opposite).

I think you'd get more useful engagement and replies if, instead of saying 'phenotypic null hypothesis' a lot and explaining the theory of what it means, you tried to explain in a 'teaching' type way how and why it matters - like, laid out a few toy examples of populations that seem to be HBD-ish if you don't account for PNH but PNH means that heritability is explained by underlying mechanisms that are less HBD-ish.

It's not perfect that interlocutors aren't doing that work themselves, but - I spent an hour yesterday diving deep into something I disagreed with, made a long post here, came out understanding it a bit better but nothing really conclusive, and got zero replies. I could do that again, sure, but I have other stuff to do, so maybe later! People do that a lot here, but it takes enough time they won't do it every time.

because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.

I'm not going to defend Turkheimer, because I don't know the guy, and a lot of academic scholars strike me as absolutely sleazy, but I think I can defend the argument.

Aquota says below:

As is constantly stated, HBD is most commonly used as an alternative to a racism of the gaps.

Sure, maybe people here and now use it this way, but it's not like we haven't seen slippery slopes happen in real time. An ironic example is "racism of the gaps" itself, didn't we get here from a completely reasonable "maybe everyone should have equal rights"? This leads me to being quite sympathetic to the idea of just tabooing anything that might lead to pushing collective responsibility. Of course the rules of such a taboo would have to be a lot different than what we have now, banning HBD while pushing CRT is unjust, and not even a stable equilibrium (and I suppose this is why we are where we are).

I agree that either both CRT and HBD should be permissible to discuss, or neither should be, with the current situation being unjust against HBD. I used to lean towards "both", wanting the free market of ideas to sort it out. However, the free market of ideas doesn't seem to work, as evidenced by lots of things including HBDers not understanding the phenotypic null hypothesis, so now I don't know what to think anymore.

The phenotypic null hypothesis is an invention of Eric Turkheimer, who confessed to being a propagandist -- the receipts are upthread. How on earth could it possibly be rational for an epistemic rationalist to even invest the time to understand his argument when he has already revealed that his arguments will have only a coincidental relationship with the truth? It's a waste of time and energy, and he intends it to be exactly that.

I don't buy that his arguments have only a coincidental corration to truth. He is biased, yes, but there is also an important signal.

Counterpoint: There is no useful correlation between what Turkheimer says on this topic and the truth, because he has already admitted that his conclusions are determined by his ethical positions rather than by the pursuit of truth.

You're just defending being a propagandist, treating the truth and knowledge as a pawn to be sacrificed instrumentally to advance your political goals.

And I'm fully supportive of people who feel that way to confess as much, so that those of us interested in the truth for its own sake know not to waste our time by treating their arguments as being made in good faith.

I see where you're coming from, but I do take issue with being portrayed as bad faith. If I was bad faith, I wouldn't come out and declare I want to taboo an entire field of knowledge, I'd do what everyone else does, and just scream "raaacist!".

I'm accusing Turkheimer of bad faith, not you. But in any event, there are plenty of instrumental reasons to adopt a false tone of scientific analysis when engaging in bad faith reasoning, not least because it's so much easier to dismiss people who start and finish with allegations of racism.

I appreciate you trying to bring nuance to the conversation, but without some examples it's still not clear to me what sorts of things you disagree with HBDers about exactly. I think the most relevant question is the extent to which the gaps in intellectual achievement, employment in various professions, and crime rates could realistically be changed by policy interventions. Do you think you have a much different answer here than HBDers?

As far as I can tell, you're saying that heritable traits might be caused along the way by others treating people differently based on their phenotype, and if that differential treatment were to go away, the presumably so would the heritability. Is that a fair summary?

And as an aside, I find the name "phenotypic null hypothesis" to be a bad name for two reasons: 1) It's not descriptive, and 2) it seems to be playing a rhetorical game by calling itself the "null hypothesis". I prefer to discuss evidence for and against various claims rather than arguing about who has the burden of proof.

I appreciate you trying to bring nuance to the conversation, but without some examples it's still not clear to me what sorts of things you disagree with HBDers about exactly.

I gave an example? The linked study? It's absolutely absurd methodology for testing the stated research question.

I think the most relevant question is the extent to which the gaps in intellectual achievement, employment in various professions, and crime rates could realistically be changed by policy interventions.

There are many possible questions one can come up with, and this is one of them, but it's not the one I'm making the threads about.

I'm making the threads about the phenotypic null hypothesis, which is a critical question for how to interpret various other kinds of evidence like twin studies.

As far as I can tell, you're saying that heritable traits might be caused along the way by others treating people differently based on their phenotype, and if that differential treatment were to go away, the presumably so would the heritability. Is that a fair summary?

Yes that is part of it, for instance if you are smart due to genetics then people will give you more education credentials and more money, and if instead people gave everyone a random amount of money, the heritability of income would disappear.

However it doesn't technically speaking have to be others treatment. It might also be your own treatment, or a result of other things like disease or physics or lots of things. Basically, variables affect each other across different levels, and that prevents heritability from distinguishing biological from nonbiological levels.

And as an aside, I find the name "phenotypic null hypothesis" to be a bad name for two reasons: 1) It's not descriptive, and 2) it seems to be playing a rhetorical game by calling itself the "null hypothesis". I prefer to discuss evidence for and against various claims rather than arguing about who has the burden of proof.

I think it has a good reason to call itself the null hypothesis. It would be absurd to claim that the heritability of income or marriage was not due to the way other people treat you phenotypically. You can't have a serious debate about HBD without the phenotypic null hypothesis being properly understood.

But so what if it is due to people treating you phenotypically? This is still genetic causation. It might indeed be interesting to some to figure out exactly through what mechanisms differences in genes result differences in income, but how exactly is this relevant for our ability to predict real world outcome of our policies? Can you show one example where “naive” (according to you) HBD would get some real world application seriously wrong, compared to approach informed by your phenotypic casual pathway correction?

I'm not talking about how things morally ought to be, I'm trying to figure out how the world is actually like. For the purpose of e.g. doing evolutionary psychology, such as with the linked study, it is relevant to know that heritability is of no evidentiary value.

it is relevant to know that heritability is of no evidentiary value.

You have not shown this. You've merely shown that heritability is not 100% ironclad.

I await your answer as to which concrete predictions HBDers will get wrong due to neglect of this.

Dude, read a few twin studies, they find that pretty much everything is heritable, of course heritability is of no evidentiary value.

Dude, read a few twin studies, they find that pretty much everything is heritable, of course heritability is of no evidentiary value.

Really? Twin studies suggest that a Korean baby raised by Americans will speak Korean? An Indian baby raised by Mormon parents will grow up Hindu?

There's plenty of non-heritable traits. Hence, heritability has evidentiary value.

Language and kind of also religion would be an exception, yes.

But beyond those exceptions, and a few others, it seems to me that there are an enormous number of traits where heritability shows up. Already at vocabulary and religiosity do you see a ton of heritability. Pretty much all personality traits and all interests are heritable. Of course the classic HBD point is that abilities tend to be heritable and highly genetically correlated. Relationship to parents, peers and teachers is heritable, I believe. Having a dog in your mid-life is heritable. Etc.

The point is that pretty much everything is heritable, so the prior for heritability is extremely high, not that absolutely everything is heritable.

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This is probably the lousiest attempt at making an argument that I have seen here. The only way you could have made it worse is if you waved a credential.

I don't need to attempt hard to make an argument if the issue is very straightforward. If P(B) is high then P(A|B) ~ P(A).

I am not asking you how things morally ought to be. What I am asking you is to provide an example of a peril that awaits HBDers if they ignore your pet concern. Is there any?

You need to understand that for me and many people, the entire point of research in this (and many other) area is to guide our real world behavior, policy making, and to answer questions like “if we want to achieve X, will doing Y work? If not, what will?”. Can you provide any non artificial example of a scenario where naively taking heritability as representing “direct biological” (whatever one understands by that) casual mechanism, will lead us to substantially different policy than when one observes that genes only actually act through phenotype, and it’s the phenotype that interacts with the real world?

I'm much more interested in the science side of things than the policy side of things, so I don't really have any strong examples at hand. It's just that I think that obviously people who refuse to understand the phenotypic null hypothesis should be purged from discussions of behavior genetics, so if HBDers don't like getting purged from discussions they should make sure to understand it.

What about purging people like Turkheimer, who explicitly put their ideology above science? Are you giving them a pass, and instead prefer to focus on those who inappropriately address your methodological pet concern?

Look, to me, you seem to be more interested in purging people and silencing the discussion, instead of in using science to learn about reality and have these learning inform our behavior and policy. You can’t even provide any example why your pet concern is relevant for me at all! I think you are wasting everyone’s time, and I think this behavior should be purged from the discussions. If you don’t like your pet concern being ignored, you should make sure to understand it.

What about purging people like Turkheimer, who explicitly put their ideology above science? Are you giving them a pass, and instead prefer to focus on those who inappropriately address your methodological pet concern?

Look, to me, you seem to be more interested in purging people and silencing the discussion, instead of in using science to learn about reality and have these learning inform our behavior and policy.

I am interested in promoting people who can help me learn things and purging people who introduce noise and waste time.

It just so happens that there are a number of very general principles that must be taken into account, as they affect the results everywhere you go. HBD is one of them! For instance, racial differences in intelligence cause a whole bunch of racial inequality in outcomes, and if you don't realize that, there's going to be a comprehensive mysterious pattern, which might make you falsely infer something like "everything is racist". However, the phenotypic null hypothesis is another one! Phenotypic causality causes a whole bunch of heritability and genetic correlations, and if you don't realize that, there's going to be a comprehensive mysterious pattern, which might make you falsely infer some sort of genetic solipsism (especially in combination with measurement error, which suppresses environmental correlations).

If someone keeps spamming racial inequality studies and talking about structural racism, while being difficult to convince to even think of alternate hypotheses, then a healthy behavior genetics group should consider purging them and finding someone more productive to talk to. But if someone keeps spamming twin studies and talking about genetics, while being difficult to convince to even think of alternate hypotheses, then a healthy behavior genetics group should again purge them.

Why? Partly to avoid noise and waste, but also partly to align incentives to actually learning things, and so on.

You can’t even provide any example why your pet concern is relevant for me at all!

You're not interested in behavior genetics, you admit so yourself! Of course a key principle of behavior genetics is not going to be interesting to you.

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It would be absurd to claim that the heritability of income or marriage was not due to the way other people treat you phenotypically. You can't have a serious debate about HBD without the phenotypic null hypothesis being properly understood.

The relevant distinction to basically any conversation where this comes up: is heritability of income due to your skin color phenotype or your doing jobs that are valued by society well phenotype?

If you want to argue that actually heritability of income is because Asians display the "smart" phenotype and blacks display the "dumb" phenotype and smartness gets rewarded in 2022 USA, you are not disagreeing with any HBD advocate. You are merely saying "aha, if we stopped rewarding intelligence with higher income then this would change", which none of them would disagree with if it were stated clearly.

I'm not saying I'm disagreeing with the core HBD conclusion. I'm saying HBDers ought to have a sufficiently good understanding of the phenotypic null hypothesis that they roll their eyes at studies claiming to find evidence for evopsych by finding traits to be heritable.

So here's a question. Can you illustrate specific testable predictions of both theories, and some experiments/measurements in which these predictions differ?

Concretely I'm asking for something like:

Experiment setup: ???

HBD prediction: X

HNU (Human Neural Uniformity) prediction: Y

X != Y

I'm asking because I vaguely recall some conversations during the ban on mentioning HBD (some years back) during which "systemic racism" was constructed as a theory which made identical predictions to HBD. Specifically, it's a force that causes Asians to excel, blacks to underperform, whites to give middling performance, and also it can't be directly measured by any methods in the social sciences.

What is "human neural uniformity"?

HNU is whatever epistemic theory you are pushing in which twin studies have no evidentiary value. My suspicion is that you're playing similar games to folks like Cosma Shalizi - tossing out a bunch of words hinting at the technical unsophistication of HBD proponents, but in reality those words don't mean much of anything.

A great way for you to show yourself to be less vapid would be to post something along the lines:

  1. A twin study measured T to be highly heritable.

  2. HBD proponents predict X as a result of heritable T.

  3. But actually actually ~X in spite of heritable T.

What's wrong with "HBD proponents think heritable T is mraningful evidence for evopsych on T, even though it's not"?

Most folks here (including myself) think "is meaningful evidence" means "results in predictions that are likely to be true". I suspect you mean something entirely different, and are perhaps engaging in wordplay and sophistry to hide the fact that you have no meaningful critique of HBD as a theory that results in testable predictions.

I consider your continued evasion of specifics as evidence in favor of sophistry. But I would think differently if you actually illustrated your claims with examples of specific testable predictions.

It's probably a modification of a moldbug neologism, "Human neurological uniformnity", from a gentle introduction p. 3. It just means - 'human intelligence and psychological traits are evenly distributed across races, no significant inter-race differences'.

But human neural uniformity sounds like a dumb and baseless theory.

Blank slatism

Blank slatism is a strawman though. E.g. Turkheimer had this denouncement to say of blank slatists who argue against heritability:

It is not a given that both sides of every argument are being reasonable. In the final analysis, this book is not reasoning forward from a known set of facts, seeking their explanation; it is confabulating backwards from a fixed conclusion, eliding any segments of the evidence that don’t lead to the preordained destination. The Trouble With Twin Studies is science denial.

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.

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.

Motte: "a trait being heritable does not mean it necessarily has a direct genetic cause"

Bailey: "a trait being heritable is not evidence that it has a direct genetic cause, and the base assumption should be that it does not have a direct genetic cause until very strong evidence exists that it does"

If I "appreciate" the 'biological null hypothesis', everything you write is wrong. What necessitates one over the other?

I ask since it looks like we are taking the presumptive priors of environmentalism, slapping it with a 'null hypothesis' label and saying that it now beats out the presumptive priors of hereditarianism. I don't see how this changes anything. Other than framing the discussion in a way where your enemy is ignorant and hasn't considered something when in reality I am pretty sure most HBD'ers are pretty well acquainted with the environmentalist worldview.

To me, as an illiterate HBD'er, it just seems like skirting the actual issues. If you don't have an alternative theory of reality to human biology to supplant the HBD one then what is the point of this? Assert we can't know anything about anything and then what? This topic isn't worth discussing outside the context of two competing explanatory worldviews.

I ask since it looks like we are taking the presumptive priors of environmentalism, slapping it with a 'null hypothesis' label and saying that it now beats out the presumptive priors of hereditarianism. I don't see how this changes anything. Other than framing the discussion in a way where your enemy is ignorant and hasn't considered something when in reality I am pretty sure most HBD'ers are pretty well acquainted with the environmentalist worldview.

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

To me, as an illiterate HBD'er, it just seems like skirting the actual issues. If you don't have an alternative theory of reality to human biology to supplant the HBD one then what is the point of this? Assert we can't know anything about anything and then what? This topic isn't worth discussing outside the context of two competing explanatory worldviews.

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).

However, before one can apply these solutions, one has to actually know what the problem is.

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.

What does the biological null hypothesis say?

Tangent but;

I don't know much about the HBD literature so you will have to bear with that.

But in the context HBD is discussed around here (group outcomes and associated CW), is something being heritable or something being genetic not a distinction without a difference? You have to keep in mind this is a CW discussion forum not a HBD discussion forum, so you might not find the best defense of HBD that you are (supposedly) looking for.

Because just about all the CW related conclusions you can pull with the assumption that intelligence is genetic holds if intelligence were merely only heritable but not genetic. I can't think of anything that changes besides the discussion section in obscure intelligence research papers.

Also what evidence would raise your priors of a trait being genetic not merely heritable, other than finding the {X-gene} ?

I don't think the phenotypic null hypothesis is directly applicable to racial differences because we have a lot of specific evidence on race and IQ that makes it not a general thing. Rather, it has effects on what sorts of arguments are relevant for race and IQ.

Also what evidence would raise your priors of a trait being genetic not merely heritable, other than finding the {X-gene} ?

Correlation with anatomy, especially directly relevant anatomy (IQ correlates with brain size).

Being consistently expressed regardless of context.

Having a clear evolutionary/theoretical reason to expect being biological.


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