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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2426 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 9, 2023

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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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Condon's The Manchurian Candidate. The trope of suspecting some hidden, embarrassing failings in everything that looks outwardly competent and yet fails to adjust has always seemed strange to me. The writing didn't live up to my expectations, but the setup so far seems like it may pay off powerfully if he does it right. I wonder how seriously anyone took this kind of fictional brainwashing at the time this came out.

I'm reading Neven Sesardić's Making Sense Of Heritability (in conjunction with many other papers and blog posts). It's a book that addresses the arguments of anti-hereditarians who claim that heritability is not a good estimate of genetic contribution to variance in a trait because of interactions, gene-environment correlations and so on. Sesardić is incredibly critical of anti-hereditarians, and very good at pointing out the flaws in their reasoning. I'm currently at the part where he explains how the equal environments assumption is tested.

His writing is quite accessible for a newcomer to behaviour genetics, and the book is quite thorough in its scope. I actually think this is a book people who are in any way interested in the topic should read, if they haven't already.

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