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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30505 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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I don't think that's intrinsically much of a "HBD answer", and my impression as an - I should say at this point - "HBD reclaimer" is that regression to the mean is used too often as a thought-terminating cliché to allow that speaker to arrive at their preconceived conclusion. Clearly there is no perfect regression to the mean, because otherwise we would not have HBD/populations with temporally consistent different means at all.

A biased sample of a base population may well regress some part of the way to its mean - but it won't regress all the way, or evolution would be impossible. Do you know anything about how far it will regress, and how fast?

Breeder's equation (which, as Greg Cochran noticed, somehow doesn't have a wikipedia article)

is that regression to the mean is used too often as a thought-terminating cliché to allow that speaker to arrive at their preconceived conclusion.

or how does it look to people who don't understand regression to the mean?

Greg Cochran

Link for @4bpp

You can think of it this way. In the first case, the parents have 20 extra IQ points. On average, 50% of those points are due to additive genetic factors, while the other 50% is the product of good environmental luck. By the way, when we say "environmental,” we mean “something other than additive genetics.” It doesn’t look as if the usual suspects—the way in which you raise your kids, or the school they attend—contribute much to this "environmental" variance, at least for adult IQ. We know what it’s not, but not much about what it is, although it must include factors like test error and being hit on the head with a ball-peen hammer.

The kids get the good additive genes, but have average "environmental" luck—so their average IQ is 110. The luck (10 pts worth) goes away.

The 120-IQ parents drawn from the IQ-85 population have 35 extra IQ points, half from good additive genes and half from good environmental luck. But in the next generation, the luck goes away… so they drop 17.5 points.

The next point is that the luck only goes away once. If you took those kids from the first group, with average IQs of 110, and dropped them on a friendly uninhabited island, they would eventually get around to mating—and the next generation would also have an IQ of 110. With tougher selection, say by kidnapping a year’s worth of National Merit Finalists, you could create a new ethny with far higher average intelligence than any existing. Eugenics is not only possible, it’s trivial.

A biased sample of a base population may well regress some part of the way to its mean - but it won't regress all the way, or evolution would be impossible. Do you know anything about how far it will regress, and how fast?

I actually don't, because there's a lot of variability in that kind of question. If you take someone who got starved of oxygen at some vital moment as a child and lost 20IQ due to some environmental insult, then the upwards regression of their children will be extremely dramatic. If you have someone who somehow lucked into getting a precise combination of alleles that end up with a 20 point IQ boost above the average, then you're going to get an extremely dramatic reversal.

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