9 ms·

Your first sentence is a complete misread of my comment, so I'm not going to reply. I said exactly the opposite of what you claim I said. Please re-read what I

• tptacek 4y ago
  You literally just said that you were using "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic determination". No, you can't do that. We can ask why there isn't evidence of genetic determinism in intelligence, and you can claim it's because of demonic opposition to the research, and I can claim that it's because studies into those genetic connections haven't been productive, but either way, heritability statistics don't give you an answer. It's one thing to suggest that a paucity of results should motivate more studies, but what you're doing is closer to suggesting that a paucity of results is evidence for the claim. Obviously, no.
• techno_tsar 4y ago
  You should read all of Ned Block's piece. It's very good. He is not just dismissing your view as "extreme geneticism". He literally explains how fallacious it is to conflate heritability with genetic determination. Using that to make judgments about genetic determination of IQ is therefore methodologically flawed and the only intellectual honest course of action is to dismiss these types of judgments outright.
  • sfblah 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • tptacek 4y ago
      This is the nth post on this thread where you repeat the argument that because you believe IQ research is suppressed, absence of evidence is in fact evidence of presence.
      • sfblah 4y ago
        I'm repeating it because it's important.
    • runarberg 4y ago
      It is interesting that you apply Occam’s razor now, but not when the question is whether we need IQ at all in our models. In a different post when asked about the utility of IQ you answered: > In general, the goal is to quantify an individual's mental potential But IQ researchers have been trying to do that for over half a century, and so far have yielded pretty limited results, especially compared to models from other fields such as cognitive psychology or neuropsychology, neither of which use IQ in their models. The principle of parsimony states that: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”. In modern psychology IQ is a useless entity. However now you are talking about pedagogy or developmental psychology where IQ and other models of intelligence is still being used (though it is getting more and more fringe). Over there nobody cares about the heritability of IQ, only whether or not they predict certain learning disabilities and (and this is old school) which traits of intelligence predicts which learning outcomes (though I would argue behavioral psychologists that don’t use IQ nor intelligence have better luck with their models). Again, if you insist on Occam’s razor, and believe (IMO wrongly) that IQ is the preferred method then heritability should be left out of the model. Now there is one more thing I’d like to address: > I’d love to see such a selective demand for rigor applied to, say, studies that suggest secondary education makes a difference in outcomes. I encourage you to read a study in developmental psychology or pedagogy. I assure you there is plenty of rigor applied. You won’t find any models that include heritability, because, like I said, scientists in the field don’t need that, so they skip it for the sake of simplicity. But what you’ll find are double blind studies, AB tests, descriptions of metrics to assess quality, descriptions of methods to assess disability, plenty of scrutiny over these methods, experiments that valuate these methods, theories which take into account seemingly successful methods, scrutiny of theories with nuanced evidence, scrutiny of methods with nuanced evidence, meta-analyses where theories are ripped apart, meta-analyses where the same theories are supported. Entering “Secondary education efficacy” actually yields over 5 million hits on Google Scholar. I call that a fairly well studied question.