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I mean jesus, of course family background is not independent of IQ, but assessments of family background can obviously be informative in understanding how we ge

I mean jesus, of course family background is not independent of IQ, but assessments of family background can obviously be informative in understanding how we get from there to here. To say that, quote, "One's intelligence is not independent of one's family or genetic background" is a flaccid truism. Nonetheless particular comparisons within assessments of family background can obviously in principle be informative even if they are hard to do. Your suggestion - with this fringe talk about "the sociologist's fallacy - is to eliminate any explanation from any study which does not assign success to invariant psychological metrics.

gwern 7y ago
> I mean jesus, of course family background is not independent of IQ Then what exactly do you think you are doing when you rant about how they didn't control for it? > Your suggestion - with this fringe talk about "the sociologist's fallacy - is to eliminate any explanation from any study which does not assign success to invariant psychological metrics. Nothing fringe about it, I'm afraid. This is well-understood in the statistics fields like causality you seem so loathe to actually learn about. The point is: when you control for something and then go on to make causal claims, you are not making a minor tweak. You are assuming an extremely implausible causal model and making strong inferences from there about what are real causes and what are not. You have entirely failed to argue for a causal model which would justify simply controlling away family background etc, and it seems from how your comments handwave it away in favor of nothingburgers, you don't even understand what you're arguing for.