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?
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Notes -
I realise this may come across as stirring the pot, but I hope I've been here long enough to have earned the benefit of the doubt.
In the context of the HBD debate, could someone please ELI5:
The concept of heritability and how it relates or doesn't relate to genetic causes of individual or group differences. I am aware of the "books at home" example. Is that all there is to it?
What precisely g is?
Steelman(!) Turkheimer's position. No, I don't want to hear about his politics.
Roughly summarise the position of Kirkegaard et al.
This whole debate always gets technical so quickly that I very often just get lost. I don't want to rehash the arguments here, I would like to understand the basics. But the waters are often so damn muddied (purposely so, I suspect) that it's very hard to get a grasp of what people are even fighting about.
As a term of art--that is, aside from its colloquial sense--heritability is "the proportion of phenotypic variation (VP) that is due to variation in genetic values (VG)." This is a mathematical concept established on population-level statistics. I am not aware of the "books at home" example or what you take from it, so I'm afraid I am unable to tell you whether that is "all there is to it." But that link to Nature is a pretty short read, if you want to know more about how heritability factors into our understanding of highly heritable traits (like IQ).
G is also a mathematical concept that turns up in statistical analysis. Researchers who assign what are believed to be diverse cognitive tasks nonetheless observe high correlation in the ability to perform well on these tasks. G is the variable assigned to track that correlation. The fact that the correlation exists tends to undermine competing theories e.g. of "multiple intelligence."
Maybe to make it more of an ELI5, it's common in American culture to think of oneself as a "math person" or a "language person," or maybe even more particularly as a "history geek" or a "physics nerd." In all kinds of standardized testing we find it's actually quite unusual to be noticeably bad at, say, linguistic analogies, while being exceptional at, say, calculus. Even things like self-regulation tend to correlate with g--in a study of prison inmates, for example, populations with higher IQs were less prone to violence (PDF warning). While there are cases of extreme divergence (sometimes so extreme we call them "idiot savants"), statistically speaking high apparent cognitive ability is multi-domain.
Note that IQ is not the same as g, but is an attempt to measure g. Note that I also say "apparent" cognitive ability: you might argue that, for example, the ways in which we parse out "separate" cognitive tasks might not actually be separate, or something. It is important, in discussing intelligence science, to recognize just how much of a "black box" our brains still are to us. We can measure inputs and outputs, and we can even get some limited sense of what is happening internally, but beyond that most of our best guesses are inescapably statistical and of limited (but probably not zero) value at the level of individual humans. But in those analyses we find strong correlations of success across task domains (defined to the best of our understanding), which is extremely difficult to explain in the absence of something like g.
I know you've posed this as a "small scale question" but what position?
Again, you're going to have to be more specific.
Thank you! That is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for. Already learned a lot, thanks!
In a lot of HBD discussions I come across people who will claim that heritability is not identical to genetic causation. I do not understand on what basis this claim is made. To quote myself:
So g is essentially a latent contruct that is not directly measurable and IQ is our attempt to come as close as possible?
Turkheimer seems to be the poster child of the position that in-between group differences, especially as related to IQ, are not biological in nature. He very often is cited authoritatively in this regard. I am aware of his political position that this type of inquiry is unsavoury (and I agree to some degree), but I am not aware of the scientific basis of his argument. It seems to be some kind of "everything is heritable, we don't know what might be the case in radically different environments, so who knows?" which just seems nonsensical to me. I am looking for a good steelman of his position but I don't even know what his position actually is.
Likewise, Kirkegaard seems to be Turkheimer's main opponent. I tried making sense of some of his blog posts, but they are all way over my head.
As I said, I am in dire need of ELI5 because I don't even know what questions I should ask to improve my understanding.
E.W. Kirkegaard is nobody's main anything. He's a guy on the internet with a BA in linguistics, who changed his name and moved countries to try to dodge a piddling amount in a libel judgment.
If you're surveying a scientific argument and both parties are addressing internet randos as major players, you're probably in the wrong part of the argument.
((I'll acknowledge here that @DaseindustriesLtd has persuasively argued that credentialism is a form of censorship used to hold HBD down. It's a good argument, but one I find kind of funny coming from HBDers))
Where's a better place to look?
Murray The Bell Curve and Coming Apart. Then on the other side The mismeasure of a man 1996 edition by Gould.
Thank you! What are the main arguments fielded in the mismeasure of man?
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