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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17715 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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A first impression: If we take a lot of leftist dogma as being true and discard obvious analogs to reality and claim they might be inaccurate, then we might just be able to explain why our ideology is seemingly not mapping on to the world around us.

Now queue the arguments through analogy, 'what if's' about reality, and a mountain of research motivated entirely by a need to collapse all genetic gravity into a neat environmentalist fold.

Scott Alexander seems to have a good eye for strategy. The article is effectively just an advertisement for a few plucky anti-hereditarian rebels who want to expose the fatal flaw of the hereditarian Death Star. Scott speaks highly of the effort, but obviously signals that he is going to wait until the rebels actually fire a torpedo into the thing. And there in lies the problem for the rebels.

For every alleged fatal flaw exhaust shaft that the hereditarian Death Star has, environmentalism has less than nothing. Every proposed theory has failed to explain the big problems. So... What's the point? What exactly are we doing here?

The fundemental problem the hereditarians face is that thier entire edifice rests on an assumption that biology, psychology, and anthropology are not only rigourous and mechanisistic, but sufficiently understood that outcomes can be manipulated in a near deterministic manner. This is manifestly not the case.

Sure biology may be more rigorous than psychology which is in turn more rigourous than anthropology, but none of them are even in the same zip code (much less the same ballpark) as electrical engineering.

The fundemental problem the hereditarians face is that thier entire edifice rests on an assumption that biology, psychology, and anthropology are not only rigourous and mechanisistic, but sufficiently understood that outcomes can be manipulated in a near deterministic manner. This is manifestly not the case.

It's also not required. No manipulation is necessary to observe heritability.

It is required if there are numerous potential varieties/mechanisms of heritability other than genetic.

And within the context of twin studies, those are?

Any number of things, thats the point. Social status, economic status, family dynamics, cultural affiliation, level of interest, environmental factors (hot/cold, wet/dry, average exposure to sunlight).

Can you be more specific?

How would social status vary more among fraternal twins than identical twins? Are there family dynamics that push fraternal twins apart (on whatever stats you use) while pulling identical twins together? Do fraternal and identical twins live in different climates?

Fraternal twins are slightly more likely to be different sexes than same sex; thats a pretty big confound.

Have twin studies been ignoring that factor?

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