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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1372 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Shower thought:

Is there a contradiction between the typical progressive belief in blank slateism and progressive women's (and some men's) choosiness in who to partner up and have babies with? If any baby can be nurtured and educated into becoming an astronaut or [insert high status white collar profession], then what's the big deal about getting DNA from a sub-optimal mate?

I've said it before: women seeking sperm donors transform into hard eugenicists. It certainly a revealed preference of some sort.

"Transform" implies change. I think it is more accurate to say that it is simply more socially acceptable to be honest about such feelings with sperm donation and thus they are more open about it in that case.

Although anecdote from people who work in the for-profit fertility industry is that they select on height a lot more strongly than on IQ or other potentially eugenic qualities.

Which is not the way, as a tall guy. There‘s no advantage to greater height on a societal scale. We have to nip this red queen gigantism in the womb before we grow to monstrous heights like the dinosaurs, and collapse under our own weight like their broiler chicken sons. The easy and practical solution would be to sterilize the women who come to the fertility clinic and select tall embryos. That way, by selecting for preferences, selection squared so to speak, we can multiply our effect on the genome.

I wouldn‘t do that, of course. But I find the battle lines drawn around eugenicism funny. The ‚ethical‘ crowd, as well as the religious, oppose eugenicism for ‚artificial‘ ‚messing with nature/god‘s plan‘. The eugenicists claimed nature‘s plan was being messed with by ‚unnatural‘ welfare, and so wanted to ‚help evolution along‘, the way it was before modernity and medicine fucked up nature‘s plan. In other words, they‘re in a naturalistic fallacy competition. I don‘t care about nature‘s plan, it‘s blind and indifferent to human flourishing.

As a tall guy (though not that tall, 6 foot 1.5 inches), why is there no advantage to greater height? Being tall is pretty cool.

Individually, yes. By comparison to other humans. Not for society. We'd all be better off if humans were half as tall.

Why, though? Tall people have more potential to build more muscle mass. This helps them load equipment or fight off wildlife.

We have machines for that. Breeding ourselves into a giant troll that can beat up a gorilla is not an efficient use of our resources. We need to get to the stars. Carrying around all that muscle consumes far too many precious calories here on earth, so imagine trying to lift that deadweight out of earth's gravity. Plus it's unhealthy, mass causes cancer.

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While there might be some sexual selection for male height going on, I doubt it’s gonna be strong enough to wind up with health problems.

Also height is pretty easy to lie about.

Also height is pretty easy to lie about.

My conspiracy theory as to why there are more men in the trades than women is that women constantly hear a bunch of false measurements, so aren't able to eyeball it (after all, if you always hear that 2.5" is actually 6", and 5'8" is actually 6', then how are you going to place nails every 8")?

More men are in the trades due to the same work-life balance and temperament issues that dictate gender ratios everywhere, with a side of upper body strength. Most men can't easily tell the difference between 5'10 and 6' either. You see plenty of women working parts houses supplying the trades- less lucrative, but more predictable hours and much more predictable, pleasant work environments.

There's a joke in the trades- a little boy has school cancelled, so his mom tells him to go watch the construction site across the street. He comes home for lunch and his mom asks him, 'so, did you learn anything?' He says, yes, I learnt how to hang a door. She says, 'how do you do that?', and he says 'well, you shove that bitch in their, and if it don't fit you shave two cunt hairs off and shove it back in...' and horrified, she tells him to go to his room. When dad gets home, she tells him to go upstairs and ask his son what he learned that day. 'So, son, what did you learn today?' 'Well, I learnt how to hang a door' 'Oh really, how do you hang a door' 'well you shove that bitch in their, and if it don't fit you shave two cunt hairs off and try again' and dad says, 'Go get me a switch' to which he says 'Fuck you, that's the electrician's job'.

Doing that for sixty hours a week is how you get started in the trades. Few women make it past this filter.

Most men can't easily tell the difference between 5'10 and 6' either.

To be fair, most people can put height in about 5 bins -- way taller, a little taller, same height, a little shorter, and really short -- compared to themselves.

Just that to the average woman, "way taller" covers a lot of ground. (and "a little bit taller" from what I hear is mostly fine)

To be fair, mine was supposed to be a joke about how many men exaggerate their - let's call it "physical attributes" - upwards.

Is there a contradiction between the typical progressive belief in blank slateism and progressive women's (and some men's) choosiness in who to partner up and have babies with?

It's just standard issue compartmentalization. Most progressives understand that kids are going to take from their parents. They know what genetics is. It's just such an obvious, omnipresent thing that it requires staggering levels of ideological malware to start disputing that white people have white kids, or that smart people have smart kids.

The problem arises when one is offered the opportunity to reason about how that dynamic might play out over large populations and large spans of time. In that case, the typical response is to just turn it off.

I don't think there are a lot of actual genetics deniers out there who don't believe in the heritability of DNA from parents to children. What gets strawmanned or parodied as "blank-slatism" is either a denial that there is a strong race/class correlation because we aren't sorting efficiently enough as a society, or a quibble about what percentage chances are involved. There's a tension between stated beliefs and revealed preferences, much like choosing schools and neighborhoods, but one can find one's way around it pretty easily.

Good substack article on the weakness of twin studies here, the particular portion I think is relevant to this question (check the article for the scatter plots):

Heritability is, by construction, a population-level aggregate. Before it can inform policy-making (or even personal decision-making), it must be interpreted at the level of individuals. This is where things get interesting and counterintuitive. Let’s say, for example, that you are a genetically average person. How much does that affect your prospects? Surprisingly, at 30%, it’s as if your genes didn’t matter at all. With an average potential, you still have a decent chance of landing at the top or bottom of the IQ distribution. Actually, in this specific random sample, one of three smartest people around (the top 0.3%) happens to have an almost exactly average genetic make-up, and the fourth dumbest person has a slightly above-average potential. At 50%, being genetically average starts to limit your optionality, but the spread remains massive. Had you been marginally luckier—say, in the top third for genetic potential—you’d still have a shot at becoming one of the smartest people around. At 80%, though, your optionality has mostly vanished. It’s still possible to move a notch upward or downward, but the game is mostly over. In this world, geniuses are born, not made.

Most debates aren't between genetics deniers who think that there is zero correlation between parents and children and feudal pedigree enthusiasts who assume that children are clones of their parents. It's a debate between people who think there's a 30% correlation and people who think there's an 80% correlation. And further, I think most of the debate between blank slatists and genetic determinists is a debate is between people who agree that the correlation is 50% but disagree about whether society is overrating or underrating that correlation. A 30% correlation is still a chance that one wants to take to benefit ones children, but it might not be a chance that you think society should shut doors against. Most people would acknowledge that there is a correlations between IQ and wealth and between parent IQ and children IQ, people still wring their hands about the fate of coal towns in Appalachia.

There's also a simple element: I don't get along with dumb people. Even if I thought having kids with a dumb girl wouldn't lead to dumb children, I wouldn't get along with the dumb girl anyway.

It's a debate between people who think there's a 30% correlation and people who think there's an 80% correlation.

I don't think that situation around this could be properly called "debate", when "good link" you posted uses "pseudoscientific" to label his opponent. Also, many people on the blank slatist side would say "this 30% is on a population level and confounded by population stratification, true causal is about 8-15%".

Median argument on public policy assumes there's 0% correlation. Even if a person agrees on paper that h2 is 30%, they are usually fiercely opposed towards updating public policy to aknowledge these 30%, so why do you think "genetics denier" is inappropriate?

I don't think there are a lot of actual genetics deniers out there who don't believe in the heritability of DNA from parents to children.

Belief in "DNA" being transmitted from parents to children != Belief in heritability of traits like cognitive ability.

I do think there are a lot of people, perhaps the majority of Western whites, who believe in some vague sense that parents pass something called "DNA" (might as well be called Feynman's "wakalix" from their standpoint) along to their children and this can lead to children having similar skin tone and hair color as their parents. However, this belief quickly starts to break down as we move toward phenotypes like cognitive ability akin to the "Phoebe Teaching Joey" meme, especially in formalized and generalized form (such as the concept of the heritability of cognitive ability).

It's a debate between people who think there's a 30% correlation and people who think there's an 80% correlation.

Just because the author of that article set his simulations using figures of 30%, 50%, and 80% doesn't mean those figures are equally supported by the evidence, or if 80% is even the upper bound for the heritability of adulthood IQ. See here, for example, where estimates of adulthood IQ heritability exceed 80% and even 85%. Poor Shared Environment ("nurture") down there hugging the x-axis of 0.

Plus, the 30%, 50%, and 80% are R-sqs, not correlations; the respective correlations are 0.55, 0.71, and 0.89.

Let’s say, for example, that you are a genetically average person. How much does that affect your prospects? Surprisingly, at 30%, it’s as if your genes didn’t matter at all. With an average potential, you still have a decent chance of landing at the top or bottom of the IQ distribution.

Supposing you're an average person is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and the "as if" is misleadingly handwavy.

I quickly replicated his 30% heritability simulation but with 1 million individuals, dividing the population into 20. Under the 30% scenario, if you're in the middle decile (ventiles 10 & 11) of genotypic IQ ("genes"), you have about twice the chance of being in the middle decile of phenotypic IQ than the top decile (ventiles 19 & 20). So it's not exactly the coinflip the author implies, although I suppose "decent chance" might be sufficiently vague as a CYA.

If you were instead in the bottom decile of genotypic IQ (ventiles 1 & 2), you'd have about a 6x greater chance of being in the bottom decile of phenotypic IQ than in the middle decile. Furthermore, you'd have over a 70x greater chance of being in the bottom decile than top decile of phenotypic IQ. Given the symmetry, same deal for the top decile of genotypic IQ with respect to the middle and bottom deciles of phenotypic IQ. Note that there are the same number of people in the bottom decile of genotypic IQ as there are in the middle decile, and the top decile as there are in the middle decile.

So even under the 30% scenario, genotypic IQ still matters plenty—much less the 50% or heaven forbid, 80% scenario.

Actually, in this specific random sample, one of three smartest people around (the top 0.3%) happens to have an almost exactly average genetic make-up, and the fourth dumbest person has a slightly above-average potential.

This is a type of base rate adjacent fallacy. The pool of people with average or below genotypic IQ is literally over 150x that of those in the top 0.3%, 50x those in the top 1%, etc. They get a lot more cracks at making it into the Top [X] of phenotypic IQ rank. Kind of like how, taking listed heights at their word (NBA players were born in the darkness of height frauding; men doing online dating merely adopted it), there appears to be a similar number of men between 6'0" and 6'3" and men between 7'0" and 7'3" in the NBA. It could be that height doesn't matter that much for basketball—or perhaps it could be because there are hundreds of thousands times more men in the former group than the latter group.

At 80%, though, your optionality has mostly vanished. It’s still possible to move a notch upward or downward, but the game is mostly over. In this world, geniuses are born, not made.

Playing with dynamite there when some studies have indeed suggested the upper bound could be well above 80%. The author does seem genuine; as he mentioned, he penned a book claiming that mathematical genius is a myth (for which in his article he provided an Amazon link). Else I'd suspect he was writing in a Straussian manner pretending to be a centrist "both-sides"ing but was actually a Chud hereditarian playing dumb, or leaving low hanging fruit engagement bait like how Reddit posts will make intentional typos or misspellings in their titles (a modern innovation in Cunningham's Law).

This is a type of base rate adjacent fallacy. The pool of people with average or below genotypic IQ is literally over 150x that of those in the top 0.3%, 50x those in the top 1%, etc. They get a lot more cracks at making it into the Top [X] of phenotypic IQ rank. Kind of like how, taking listed heights at their word (NBA players were born in the darkness of height frauding; men doing online dating merely adopted it), there appears to be a similar number of men between 6'0" and 6'3" and men between 7'0" and 7'3" in the NBA. It could be that height doesn't matter that much for basketball—or perhaps it could be because there are hundreds of thousands times more men in the former group than the latter group.

Surely you agree that it is possible to both over or under rate the importance of height for a basketball player? Height is critically important for basketball, and a player is nearly always, ceteris paribus, better and more useful for a team if he as inch taller. But if you proposed trading Tyrese Maxey for Zach Edey, you'd be making a mistake.

There can bo societies that overrate the importance of genetic heritage, and societies that underrate it.

Surely you agree that it is possible to both over or under rate the importance of height for a basketball player? ...There can bo societies that overrate the importance of genetic heritage, and societies that underrate it.

I reject the attempt at reframing and equivocating via a hypothetical after the excerpt you selected—from an article you selected—turned out to be an own-goal on the initial point you were trying to make because you lacked understanding of what you were quoting.

A better question would not be whether there "can bo [sic]" societies that underrate or overrate the heritability of cognitive ability, but whether societies in the world we live in underrate or overrate the heritability of cognitive ability, insofar as they rate cognitive ability or heritability at all.

A partner with more resources can better nurture and educate their blank slate while a partner with less resources can't.

Not really, the alibi would be that partner choice matters from a nurture perspective since everyone knows your and your partner’s nurturing is the most important determinant in whether your child becomes an astronaut or [insert high status white collar profession], followed by Socioeconomic Factors (of which your partner also contributes). The Science has consistently suggested that heritability is the strongest driver of offspring outcomes in Western countries, but here it’s Bad Faith Science that must be wrong in some way.

The funnier epicycles come when trying to explain why women, including progressive women, opt for tall and smart sperm donors. To the extent explanations are even attempted, that is, as opposed to the subject being ignored or discourse being shutdown.

If they were just looking for a sperm donor you would have a point, but if they're looking for a partner that they spend time with they also have to factor in whether the father actually became an astronaut or not.

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