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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28140 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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In a large thread about HBD, this comment https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187753?context=8#context was not replied. @OliveTapenade @guesswho @HlynkaCG @Questionmark

Since IQ scores are usually unavailable in large genetic databases, largest studies use "educational attainment" (EA, a variable dimensioned in number of years studied for individual's highest degree). Davide Piffer took polygenic index function derived from European populations and computed its values for some other populations, and plotted them vs their phenotypic IQs.

Of course, using polygenic index on another population than which polygenic index was derived isn't good. But this is bad in a sense that it is not accurate for estimating an individual from that another population (mostly because of linkage disequilibrium) but here we are interested in relative ranking of population averages, and they align fairly well. If using PGI to get another population averages was bad, we could predict it would be produce zero correlations and correlation -1 just as likely as +1. We could have seen bias associated with genetic distance from reference population or bias associated with relative position on PCA chart, but we don't. Maybe Piffer cherrypicked results? If so, why wouldn't be the best response to it is to re-do his analysis and show proper ~0 correlation?

Anti-HBD, what's your response to this? Why do you repeat "legacy of slavery" ad nauseam but ignore what genetics starts to explore? (link about mostly the same: https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/sasha-gusev-wont-answer-basic-questions )

Like @The_Nybbler I am deeply skeptical of educational attainment as a proxy for raw intelligence. If anything it strikes me as a case of affirming the consequent. Simple truth is that I've met too many 60th percentile ASVABs who were demonstrably capable of organizing/supervising complex evolutions involving hundreds of people and dozens of moving parts, just as I've met too many post-grads from prestigious institutions who I wouldn't trust to boil water, to take such claims at face value.

More generally I will reiterate my take from the previous thread. While Thomas Sowell does not address HBD directly I find it hard not to read his "vision of the anointed" in to pretty much everything HBDers post here. The scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and a significant portion of users here defended it. To be clear, The NFL had been collecting Wonderlic score on players since the late 70s, and what they got caught doing was artificially adjusting the scores of high-performing black players downward to change the racial distribution of disability payouts. On a dime I saw users who had claimed to support standardized testing flip from "the data obviously supports our conclusion" to "we must correct manipulate the data to better reflect the truth". This is what might be called in another context; "saying the quiet part out loud" and it exposes the fact that HBD as it is advocated for here on theMotte and more generally amongst rationalists is much more of a normative belief than a descriptive one. An argument over "ought"s rather "are"s.

Yes, I catch lot of flak on this forum for maintaining that Utilitarianism is a stupid and evil ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, but I feel that the discourse surrounding HBD is an apt illustration of the problem. Once you've gone on the record in defense of lying or manipulating data to defend your preferred narrative or achieve your preferred policy outcomes, what reason does anyone else have to trust you? Contra The Sequences and Scott Alexander, information does not exist in a vacuum, and arguments do not spring fully formed from the either. The proles are not stupid. They recognize that the Devil can quote scripture, and that a liar can tell the truth when it suits them. Thus the fundamental question one must always be prepared to ask when evaluating a statement is not whether a statement is true or false, but "Cui Bono?".

Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who does not benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit.

I’m an HBD skeptic, but I will steelman to the extent that studying these sorts of things is very difficult even if there weren’t people interested in pushing the data to support their ideas. The data frankly isn’t there, and we’re using proxy data on almost every front. Nations are not always homogeneous and therefore using e.g. Sweden’s results as White peoples’s results is always going to be a bit much. Add in the confounding factors (quality of the school system, students’s health, wealth, and culture) and you have a mess even before you turn to finding a proxy (often just as difficult to measure) for IQ. Then you come to whether or not a country is reporting data honestly, whether EA can mean different things in different countries, and so on.

I don’t mind if someone tries to correct obviously bad data as long as it’s done in a way that doesn’t bias the results and that’s fairly honest. Norming EA to the standard of international math and reading tests is perfectly reasonable. Knocking off three years of attainment because it’s a majority black country isn’t.

(often just as difficult to measure) for IQ

what do you mean by this, you're writing just to inflate word count? IQ tests require from 30 minutes to hour or more, and many people do not want to waste time on it. Ticking boxes in questionaire about degree they have is less than minute, and more people cooperate.

whether EA can mean different things in different countries, and so on.

this is a non-issue since EA here only used for getting polygenic index in reference population which is either one country or some quite similar countries. Then, polygenic index is used to predict which EA other population would had if they lived in reference country.

Knocking off three years of attainment because it’s a majority black country isn’t.

you're imagining what your outgroup done bad?

Educational attainment is a poor proxy because unless you have a standard curriculum across the entire cohort of the study, the end point can vary widely even if the students are reported to have completed the same grade level. Even within countries, school districts and even individual schools can vary enough that it’s not a good proxy. In my area, private Catholic schools are much more rigorous than public suburban schools, which are more rigorous than public urban schools. Taking the scores of even local students and comparing them with the polygenetic index is a bit difficult when a 12th grader at St. Simon Catholic School is expected to take calculus, while his peer in an urban school is expected to maybe master basic algebra in 12th grade. It might well be that if the urban students were put in the Catholic school, they’d be knocked back by several years based on the material covered.

I’ll agree that it’s easier to get compliance on a tick box than an IQ test, but the results are as I said above often not directly comparable between regions and certainly not between countries with different systems.

The example I gave was mostly an example of what bad faith would look like. I don’t think you’re doing it, but if someone were trying to fudge the numbers in a given direction. If you’re basing your estimated correction on curricula not being the same, or standardized test results between countries, that makes sense. But you’d have to do it on the basis of the content the students know or were taught. It can’t be based on making an assumption based on location, language or race if you want results between locations, languages, and races to mean anything.

I'm afraid you haven't read what Piffer & Kirkegaard done. p.s. edited: grammar

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