4 ms·

Before this thread I didn't even know who Richard Lynn was. Now I do, but I don't care. Look, I gave you the etymology of the word and the current definition. B

by sfblah 4y ago

Before this thread I didn't even know who Richard Lynn was. Now I do, but I don't care. Look, I gave you the etymology of the word and the current definition. Both disagree with your wokeism. This is getting tiresome.

tptacek 4y ago
In case the subtext wasn't clear, the definition I'm providing for "heritability" is the scientific definition, and has been for decades. My understanding is that it comes from woke biostatisticians like Karl Pearson, who applied it to the woke problem of working out how to select and propagate characteristics in agricultural products, back in the woke 1930s. Somebody can correct me on this if I have the chronology wrong. I'm happy to keep going on like this, because you're surfacing a lot of pernicious "race science" myths in their absolute most easily rebutted form, which is (and here truly there is no snark intended) a sort of service to the thread.
- sfblah 4y ago
  https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/genetics-dictionary/def/heritability https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/genetics-di... I quote, from the National Cancer Institute (a scientific institution you may have heard of): "The proportion of variation in a population trait that can be attributed to inherited genetic factors." You're just lying or misinformed. Either way, it's starting to get hard to be civil with you.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I don't think you understand the words you just quoted, since they (obviously) support my argument, not yours.
  - throaway31122 4y ago
    I think you may be missing the argument tptacek is making. He is conceding your definition. However he is distinguishing between the concepts of "heritability" (variance that can be statistically attributed to genetic factors) and "genetic determinism" (variance that is caused by genetics). To drive a wedge between these two concepts, he is drawing on examples like the ones put forth in Ned Block's paper, like how wearing of earrings is (or at least used to be) almost perfectly correlated with having XX chromosomes, despite the fact that being biologically female does not directly cause the wearing of earrings. Thus, according to him, your interpretation of heritability is bogus, unscientific, race science, etc. Is this a good argument? I don't think it is. While XX chromosomes may not directly cause the wearing of earrings (or lipstick), genetics clearly are a link in the causal chain that ultimately creates the variance observed when heritability is measured. Women wear earrings because they are biologically women and we live in a culture where women wear earrings. The two factors combine to produce the effect. The most charitable interpretation of tptacek's point is that there are other, non-genetic inputs into the directed graph of causes, that these non-genetic factors combine with the genetic factors to produce the variance, and that the non-genetic factors are morally more important. For example, clearly culture plays a role in why only women wore earrings when Block wrote his paper. This is even more clear when we see that this is no longer the case, and now it is reasonably common for men to wear earrings too. The logical conclusion is that non-genetic factors can interact with a genetic factor to produce a difference that the genetic factor itself could not have produced. For example, you could imagine a scenario where racial prejudice and discrimination caused teachers to give up on black kids based on nothing but their race, causing them never to achieve the IQ they could have achieved if they had been given the same educational attention as a white kid. This would be a case where an IQ difference is heritable, even though the true blame lies with how people are treated based on their race. But is that the world we live in? Given the strong heritability of IQ, and the enduring disparities that are frustratingly durable even through decades of remarkable social change, I think the onus is on the people proposing such an extra non-genetic factor to identify and measure it, in a way that can be isolated and empirically evaluated. Otherwise the argument is isomorphic to: "you're a race scientist if you think that height differences between population groups could be caused by genetics." The extra, non-genetic factors that people would propose (socio-economic status especially) can be controlled for, and do not seem to explain the gap. Most teachers seem to value the success of racial minorities as highly, if not more highly, than other students. I think that some cultural anti-patterns in black culture could certainly play a part (like cultural pressure against being a good student), but that has been decreed to be just as verboten as the genetic hypothesis.

by sfblah 4y ago

tptacek 4y ago

In case the subtext wasn't clear, the definition I'm providing for "heritability" is the scientific definition, and has been for decades. My understanding is that it comes from woke biostatisticians like Karl Pearson, who applied it to the woke problem of working out how to select and propagate characteristics in agricultural products, back in the woke 1930s. Somebody can correct me on this if I have the chronology wrong. I'm happy to keep going on like this, because you're surfacing a lot of pernicious "race science" myths in their absolute most easily rebutted form, which is (and here truly there is no snark intended) a sort of service to the thread.

sfblah 4y ago
https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/genetics-dictionary/def/heritability https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/genetics-di... I quote, from the National Cancer Institute (a scientific institution you may have heard of): "The proportion of variation in a population trait that can be attributed to inherited genetic factors." You're just lying or misinformed. Either way, it's starting to get hard to be civil with you.
- tptacek 4y ago
  I don't think you understand the words you just quoted, since they (obviously) support my argument, not yours.
- throaway31122 4y ago
  I think you may be missing the argument tptacek is making. He is conceding your definition. However he is distinguishing between the concepts of "heritability" (variance that can be statistically attributed to genetic factors) and "genetic determinism" (variance that is caused by genetics). To drive a wedge between these two concepts, he is drawing on examples like the ones put forth in Ned Block's paper, like how wearing of earrings is (or at least used to be) almost perfectly correlated with having XX chromosomes, despite the fact that being biologically female does not directly cause the wearing of earrings. Thus, according to him, your interpretation of heritability is bogus, unscientific, race science, etc. Is this a good argument? I don't think it is. While XX chromosomes may not directly cause the wearing of earrings (or lipstick), genetics clearly are a link in the causal chain that ultimately creates the variance observed when heritability is measured. Women wear earrings because they are biologically women and we live in a culture where women wear earrings. The two factors combine to produce the effect. The most charitable interpretation of tptacek's point is that there are other, non-genetic inputs into the directed graph of causes, that these non-genetic factors combine with the genetic factors to produce the variance, and that the non-genetic factors are morally more important. For example, clearly culture plays a role in why only women wore earrings when Block wrote his paper. This is even more clear when we see that this is no longer the case, and now it is reasonably common for men to wear earrings too. The logical conclusion is that non-genetic factors can interact with a genetic factor to produce a difference that the genetic factor itself could not have produced. For example, you could imagine a scenario where racial prejudice and discrimination caused teachers to give up on black kids based on nothing but their race, causing them never to achieve the IQ they could have achieved if they had been given the same educational attention as a white kid. This would be a case where an IQ difference is heritable, even though the true blame lies with how people are treated based on their race. But is that the world we live in? Given the strong heritability of IQ, and the enduring disparities that are frustratingly durable even through decades of remarkable social change, I think the onus is on the people proposing such an extra non-genetic factor to identify and measure it, in a way that can be isolated and empirically evaluated. Otherwise the argument is isomorphic to: "you're a race scientist if you think that height differences between population groups could be caused by genetics." The extra, non-genetic factors that people would propose (socio-economic status especially) can be controlled for, and do not seem to explain the gap. Most teachers seem to value the success of racial minorities as highly, if not more highly, than other students. I think that some cultural anti-patterns in black culture could certainly play a part (like cultural pressure against being a good student), but that has been decreed to be just as verboten as the genetic hypothesis.