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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Your post is indeed incredibly ironic; In the beginning of the post you try to obfuscate an unfavored finding by claiming it's just too complex to understand, and then in the last paragraph you reduce everything to a single incredibly convenient theory, namely that it's all just stress levels and if we just fix that, everything else will fix itself as well! Very nice, if true.

Stress levels probably have some minor effect, but most of the research in this field doesn't even attempt to control for genetics or causality in the other direction. I happen to be a postdoc in biomedical research, so I just took a glance at the study your article is referring to (which wasn't even linked in the article, lol), for anyone interested: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/1761544

It's... not good. Or to be more specific, it's designed to be incapable of resolving the question you want it to resolve. They test a single theory, namely that income directionally causes everything. They don't even attempt to test the alternative, they only test against the null hypothesis, that income is unrelated to everything. Something nobody thinks anyway. Not that I'm surprised, this is just par for the course of the field.

Your other paper is well-known, but mostly very misleading. It's pretty much on the same level as the paper that found that men and women don't differ significantly if you take a list of 100 random biomedical traits, and therefore men and women are mostly the same; Sure, the former is obviously true, but nobody disputes that and the latter is just a complete non-sequitor. It's misleading on three levels:

First, his investigated measure ω merely tells us that two population are somewhat overlapping. It tells us very little about difference in means, which is what we're usually interested in. In fact, his finding of ω = 0.2 for Sub-Saharan vs European is absolutely compatible with large average differences between the groups.

Second, it's again just an assortment of random genes, but we usually care about specific sets of genes relating to known phenotypic traits. For a particularly simple example, you can't counter "they have phenotypically different skin colors, and we can show that these relate to differences in genes A and B" with "well we can show that over all genes in aggregate the differences are pretty small, so DEBUNKED". But obviously this is only ever applied if people dislike a particular gene/phenotype interaction.

Third, the most damning by far, and I'll just quote the paper itself:

To assess claim c, we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population. We show that claim c, the observation of high ω, holds with small collections of loci. It holds even with hundreds of loci, especially if the populations sampled have not been isolated from each other for long. It breaks down, however, with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations: In such cases, ω becomes zero.

"Claim c" is, for the understanding of the interested reader:

(c) pairs of individuals from different populations are often more similar than pairs from the same population.

So he finds that this core claim, the claim why you're quoting the entire paper in the first place, only holds for closely related populations (duh) or if you wilfully ignore the majority of the genome. His example of ω = 0.2 for Sub-Saharan vs European, do you want to take a guess how many loci he used? 10.000? 1000? Nope, it's, wait for it, ... 50! I guess he himself is excused bc this was 2007, he probably would have wanted to do 100 loci but his Prof told him they only have money for 50, hah.

Spending a few hours compiling a long and detailed post debunking HBD is particularly uninteresting to this forum and would be like trying to teach a pig to roller-skate, a waste of time and annoying to the pig; however, on the other hand spending a few hours proving how strong the genetic effect is on the population would be wonderfully received. I invite you to spend the time and that post-doc giving all the people here what they want to see, they will love you for it. Go on, I would love to see some actual evidence for this phenomenon.

RenOS lives in Germany. I'm not 100% on the laws there, but my understanding is that doing such a postdoc might actually get him thrown in jail.

HBD certainly isn’t illegal in Germany. Germany has relatively liberal speech laws on anything except things related to 1933-1945, which tend to fit into two categories (the Holocaust/antisemitism and ‘advocating the overthrow of democracy/the constitution’). For garden variety un-PC speak Germany is probably better than anywhere in the Anglosphere except the United States, admittedly a low bar. Germany actually has very strong protections against being fired for political speech for example, Höcke was legally declared a fascist, called the Holocaust memorial a disgrace etc but is still technically a registered high school teacher (he doesn’t teach on account of his political election). All the SPD could do was declare that if he returned to teaching they would try their best to have him fired, but it’s unclear they could do so.

Germany has relatively liberal speech laws on anything except things related to 1933-1945, which tend to fit into two categories

If by "relatively liberal" you mean you'll get fined rather than sent to prison (probably), then yes.

What German speech law does HBD violate? As far as I’m aware there are in fact German evolutionary psychologists who openly argue in favor of HBD, and they haven’t been fined or even fired.

I'm not a lawyer, let alone a German one, but there was a pretty big story during the refugee crisis, where a German couple got fine for a pretty milquetoast Facebook post. It doesn't surprise me German HBDers remain more or less unmolested because the way laws are applied tends to be pretty arbitrary, but that also means they can suddenly decide to change their mind, and persecute them.

Thanks for doing the detailed rebuttal.