3 ms·

I'm not really sure how to re-state any clearer -- just try to follow the math -- but my underlying claim was that "differences in distribution don't tell you a

I'm not really sure how to re-state any clearer -- just try to follow the math -- but my underlying claim was that "differences in distribution don't tell you anything about individuals" misses the point: yes, of course differences in distributions don't tell you about a given individua. I'm saying observed differences in winners don't provide very strong evidence for _differences in distributions_. There are several issues: winning reveals the maximum of the distribution, not the mean or sd. An observed pattern of one country winning might reflect different distributional means. It might reflect same means and different standard deviations. It might reflect that the number of observations is larger and thus the probability of an outlier at a certain number of sd above the mean is higher. But beyond that, there are also obvious non-genetic processes that even in a toy distribution can produce a winning country that has lower genetic capability. The entire enterprise of saying "Kenyans win running, so Kenyans are more genetically talented at running" is unsupported.

spiralx 5y ago
> The entire enterprise of saying "Kenyans win running, so Kenyans are more genetically talented at running" is unsupported. Or as my father once framed the argument: "It's because they've only recently come out of the jungle right" and when I yelled at him explained his reasoning with, "That's not racist, stands to reason they'd be better at physical things, we've evolved over millions of years to not need that sort of thing any more." at which point my mum told me not to call my dad a racist and to leave the dinner table, which I most certainly did. It's amazing looking back how racist the 80s were when I was growing up. The framing has gone from outright racism that was "common knowledge" everyone accepted, and been dog-whistled into this seemingly academic debate about the effects of genetic differences between population groups, which is so far removed from the original that it's hard to tell who really is "just asking questions" and who wants to talk about "coming down from the jungle" without being labelled a racist. On a more technical level, was your equation meant to be y_i = D_i theta_i + (1 - D_i) 0 i.e. "theta" was supposed to be "theta_i"

spiralx 5y ago

> The entire enterprise of saying "Kenyans win running, so Kenyans are more genetically talented at running" is unsupported. Or as my father once framed the argument: "It's because they've only recently come out of the jungle right" and when I yelled at him explained his reasoning with, "That's not racist, stands to reason they'd be better at physical things, we've evolved over millions of years to not need that sort of thing any more." at which point my mum told me not to call my dad a racist and to leave the dinner table, which I most certainly did. It's amazing looking back how racist the 80s were when I was growing up. The framing has gone from outright racism that was "common knowledge" everyone accepted, and been dog-whistled into this seemingly academic debate about the effects of genetic differences between population groups, which is so far removed from the original that it's hard to tell who really is "just asking questions" and who wants to talk about "coming down from the jungle" without being labelled a racist. On a more technical level, was your equation meant to be y_i = D_i theta_i + (1 - D_i) 0 i.e. "theta" was supposed to be "theta_i"