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Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

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Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#741

Post by cloudfifty »

dash2 wrote: post #739
cloudfifty wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a ridiculously biased Fox News level link. Clearly no room for a fruitful discussion here.

Do you think they invented his quotes? There's usually room for a fruitful discussion if you want one.

> Do you think they invented his quotes? There's usually room for a fruitful discussion if you want one.

No. But do I think that their "interpretation" is even close to charitable and that there's a even faintest chance that we'll get somewhere from that starting point? No, not a chance.

The author is of course the author of some "abolish the NHS book/report" as well. Do you honestly believe that this sort of such stuff is represented by anything other than monied interests?

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#742

Post by littlestymaar »

xyzzyz wrote: post #722
littlestymaar wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of the book is largely that people within the same part of the world have widely varying outcomes, which, to a large degree, are explained by their IQ. Except the data they use is not IQ (they are using AFQT Score because that's the available data) and they are artificially constructing an equivalent IQ. The original data doesn't even fit a bell curve (because there's no reason a given test should). For s…

AFQT is widely accepted in the psychometric literature to be an IQ test. Military itself believes so: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/MG265/... They literally say that they believe AFQT measures the same thing as WAIS (a standard IQ test) is measuring.

> For 200 air force enlistees

Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake.

Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone (even if I don't see reasons to assume genetics has no impact on it either).

And btw, the study you quote explicitly rules out the conversion done in the book:

> no direct one-to-one correspondence AFQT percentile scores and IQ scores can be stated.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#743

Post by tsimionescu »

marcusverus wrote: post #724
tsimionescu wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that reduced dominance of Europeans in total population doesn't make a lot of difference in the 135+ pool. Employers seeking these exceptionally intelligent young adults were choosing from a pool [...] This is one mistake, and the danger of using IQ as anything more than a trend indicator. Employers don't need 'people with an IQ over ${ARBITRARY_CUTOFF}'. They need 'people who can do X and Y'. And IQs over 100…

> This is one mistake, and the danger of using IQ as anything more than a trend indicator. Employers don't need 'people with an IQ over ${ARBITRARY_CUTOFF}'. They need 'people who can do X and Y'. Even exams which focus on pass/fail of an aptitude rather than excellence show little 'racial' variance in general. The scientific literature is very clear on this point--IQ is predictive of job performance. If you need peo…

> Self-reporting is always how race is assigned. Self-reporting is how we know that certain minorities are 'underrepresented' in certain jobs--folks self-report their race when hired.

Sure, because race is entriely social construct. It's impossible to find a genetic link between the vague notion of 'black' and IQ, because people who are in the social category 'black' or 'latin' or 'european' have a wide variety of genotypes.

As such, the only possible conclusion from IQ studies is that IQ is a measurement of social and perhaps early childhood environments. So, improving conditions for marginalized groups will improve IQ and implicitly improve other success metrics (to the extent those are correlated with IQ).

Note - IQs below 100 are a different matter entirely, and they mostly represent known developmental disorders such as Kleinefelter, or severe malnutrition in early life (a preventable condition, but irreversible).

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#744

Post by ramblerman »

_fhnu wrote: post #390
blast wrote: post #293

Chomsky wrote the definitive progressive answer to all this 50 years ago: https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20block... Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve. Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the…

Great comment. As you say, denying the research outright is playing a similar tune to those who would abuse the research to support pre-existing notions about everyone's rightful places in society. We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power, which is a typical endpoint for too many discussions of genetics. Using science to validate the status quo and de…

Agreed, the trick is to keep policy at the individual level. Because assumptions or observations of group behavior cause problems on both the right and the left.

For instance, there is a strong progressive assumption that the male/female divide if it were truly fair would be 50/50 in all industries (or at least the ones they focus on, e.g. comp sci).

But you can't on the one hand make bold statements about expected outcomes and then remain blind to the science of group differences. These issues would be far simpler if solved by focusing purely on individual achievement.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#745

Post by blacktriangle »

selimthegrim wrote: post #664
TMWNN wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In year 2021, I can tell you, not only genetics is taboo, culture is also taboo now. If an academic dares to say that culture matters in student outcomes (learning, discipline), the person can also get canceled. An example of culture mattering is Britain, where you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent: * Indian Hindus * Indian Sikhs * Indian and Pakistani Muslims Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful;…

It's not a fair comparison because the Sikhs (mostly rich landowning Jats) and Hindus (mostly Brahmins and Baniyas) coming over have a lot of preselection. Muslims are a) more of a simple random sample b) largely from Mangla dam area in Mirpur in PK case c) part of endogamous lower caste groups (less likely)

How many atrocities does an ideology have to commit before people will admit that the ideology might be a problem?

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#746

Post by selimthegrim »

blacktriangle wrote: post #745
selimthegrim wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a fair comparison because the Sikhs (mostly rich landowning Jats) and Hindus (mostly Brahmins and Baniyas) coming over have a lot of preselection. Muslims are a) more of a simple random sample b) largely from Mangla dam area in Mirpur in PK case c) part of endogamous lower caste groups (less likely)

How many atrocities does an ideology have to commit before people will admit that the ideology might be a problem?

How did we get from underperforming to atrocities?

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#747

Post by xyzzyz »

littlestymaar wrote: post #742
xyzzyz wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFQT is widely accepted in the psychometric literature to be an IQ test. Military itself believes so: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/MG265/... They literally say that they believe AFQT measures the same thing as WAIS (a standard IQ test) is measuring.

> For 200 air force enlistees Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake. Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone (even if I don't see reasons to assume genetics has no impact on it either). And btw, the study you…

> Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake.

No, because everything else we know about IQ, especially the existence of positive manifold, strongly suggest that it will also correlate at lower IQs too. You can’t just say “the study on X has not included Y, therefore we should have absolutely no expectations about any sort of relationship between X and Y”. That’s not how science works.

Alas, there have been other studies done, and it turns out that indeed, AFQT/ASVAB score and IQ correlation does in fact extend to areas on the left side of the distribution too, exactly as expected. To reiterate: this correlation exists across entire spectrum, not only among high IQ people. If anything, the correlation at high IQ is lower than expected, because of range restriction effect.

> Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone

Fortunately, nobody is claiming that, so you won’t have to put much effort to convince anyone otherwise.

> no direct one-to-one correspondence AFQT percentile scores and IQ scores can be stated.

It can, though. The problem is that the population of military test takers is not representative of population at large. For one thing, its average intelligence will probably be higher, due to relative scarcity of mentally disabled people. However, if you know the parameters of IQ distribution among military test takers, you can easily convert AFQT/ASVAB to IQ.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#748

Post by xyzzyz »

pcrh wrote: post #701
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sfblah is right. We will be able to predict based on our knowledge of the little molecules inside you at some point, we just can't do it now. The 70-80% is heritable and not via parenting. It is contingent on an environment that provides things like food and air, and the basic idea is that we control for the environment in some simplistic way via twin studies.

To illustrate, there is almost no difference between the genetics of humans 20,000 years ago compared to today. Yet there is a vast difference in what people understand and how they interact with the world, i.e. there has been an increase in "intelligence" in the past 20k years without there being any alteration to genetics. It is also shown by the so-called "Flynn effect" [0], which is a substantial rise in measured…

> To illustrate, there is almost no difference between the genetics of humans 20,000 years ago compared to today.

There is also almost no difference between genetics of humans and chimpanzees. No difference, except in a few areas that happen to matter a lot.

As it turns out, 20 000 years is plenty enough for natural selection to make dramatic change in the genetic makeup of the population. For a most obvious example, look at the spread of lactase persistence mutation, which occurred and started spreading less than 20 000 years ago.

> It is also shown by the so-called "Flynn effect" [0], which is a substantial rise in measured IQ by over 1 SD in numerous populations during the 20th Century alone. This is comparable to the mean difference in intelligence between individuals, and absolutely cannot be accounted for by changes to genetics.

The Flynn gains are hollow, though. They are not on g factor, and it’s the g factor that’s responsible for the predictive validity of IQ.

Imagine a society where people use human foot length to measure distances. After a century or two, they observe that everything is getting shorter, a sort of anti-Hubble effect. Nobody noticed, however, that people have become taller on average, and so their feet became longer, so the actual change is only in the used metric, not the latent variable they are trying to measure. Flynn effect is like that.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#749

Post by littlestymaar »

xyzzyz wrote: post #747
littlestymaar wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For 200 air force enlistees Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake. Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone (even if I don't see reasons to assume genetics has no impact on it either). And btw, the study you…

> Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake. No, because everything else we know about IQ, especially the existence of positive manifold, strongly suggest that it will also correlate at lower IQs too. You can’t just say “the study on X has not included Y, therefore…

> You can’t just say “the study on X has not included Y, therefore we should have absolutely no expectations about any sort of relationship between X and Y”. That’s not how science works.

Oh yes it is. Extrapolating outside of study sample is either a scientific rookie mistake or just plain fraud. Doing so in any hard-science topic would earn you an angry comment from your reviewers.

> Fortunately, nobody is claiming that, so you won’t have to put much effort to convince anyone otherwise.

Oh, and I guess Herrnstein and Murray didn't publish that book? Because they definitely do so in The Bell Curve: They are literally plotting AFQT and SES (their bogus “socioeconomic factors”) against social outcome and since AFQT has a higher correlation than SES, they conclude that genetics must be the decisive factor!

And if you read my previous comment, you'd notice that the AFQT -> IQ is only a part of the issue in the Bell Curve, the bigger part being how they assume AFQT -> genetics because they assume AFQT = IQ = g = genetics. (The last steps being an ideological stance, which Herrnstein have been defending for decades prior to the publication of the Bell Curve so it's not really a surprise…)

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#750

Post by visarga »

Kbelicius wrote: post #715
visarga wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialism is a system where a clique of powerful people jail and abuse anyone who opposes their ways. Ostensibly it's for the good of society, but in reality it's just for the ruling class. Source: lived under socialism for 14 years. Also observe N.K. Come to think of it, it's a woke utopia. Enforced equality, anti-meritocracy and cancellings making everyone live under constant fear.

Meh, none of that is socialism. Those things also happen in capitalist societies so I guess we could also say that those things are capitalism... it seems that to you there is no distinction between capitalism and socialism. Also, your source is bad. It is like saying that you read something in a book... Which book?

> Those things also happen in capitalist societies

Yeah, read up on the way secret police worked in ex-communist countries and come back.

> Also, your source is bad. It is like saying that you read something in a book... Which book?

My own experiences. Have you ever lived under a totalitarian socialist regime? Have you had to suffer for ideological persecution?

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