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>I've never considered this to be taboo either, it's bloody obvious. Is there some sort of hidden context here I'm not getting? There is. So the problem comes

>I've never considered this to be taboo either, it's bloody obvious. Is there some sort of hidden context here I'm not getting? There is. So the problem comes in when you start looking at something like say a particular minority racial/ethnic group and then picking some statistic that is higher or lower than the average over all people and associating that statistic with bad outcomes like violent offenses, lack of conscientousness/underachievement, etc. So for example, if you're saying that violent offenses can be attributed to heritable personality traits (rather than environmental/circumstantial) in those groups of people, you're basically right back to the old and not-so-old eugenic and racist arguments about human behavior. It's likely that there is some effect there, but the question is to what extent is that useful information in terms of education/discussion or setting policy goals and stuff. Also, there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot. (It's not hard to imagine that the same personality trait that tends to produce aggression could manifest VERY differently for someone raised in an environment where physical violence was common and necessary to survive, vs someone upper middle class, or someone in the CEO private-school class of people.)

whimsicalism 2y ago
Speak for yourself. I was the one who made the original taboo comment and you are simply putting tons of words in my mouth. There are much simpler, much more solid mechanistically scientifically associations that are still taboo to discuss that imo have nothing to do with race (race isn't even a real thing). For instance, a common argument I hear is that "standardized tests are just testing affluence" because the correlation between parental income and standardized test performance is so high. It seems pretty obvious to me that there are potential heritable confounders there, but I would never feel comfortable discussing this publicly. It's also frustrating because people will strongly implicitly weight the evidence by what they want to be true. Anything contrary to what they want to be true gets much stricter scrutiny than the reverse. For instance, "there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot" is simply not an accurate statement of the science. Measurable environmental factors don't explain even remotely close to everything. A lot (or all of the remaining) could just be random variance, but the idea that there just isn't much variance left to explain otherwise is absurdly wrong but people want it to be true.
- deleted 2y ago
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- Enginerrrd 2y ago
  Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't intend to say that's what you were saying at all. My hypothetical used the words "you're" and that's just a bad habit of mine, it was not intended to indicate that I thought that you thought that way. I understood what you were saying, and I had no intention of attributing such ill-will to you. I was only trying to explain the logical chain that can lead to the original observation/opinion to be considered a taboo one. For what it's worth, I'm totally on your side, but I was only trying to illustrate the problems with going down that line of thinking, and why some consider it taboo. There are some deep problems in the social sciences right now. The fact that some feel reluctant to discuss things they believe to be true is a bad thing in my opinion because it eliminates the opportunity for counter-arguments to be made and considered. I also think that the arguments on how standardized tests merely test affluence are terrible, and sometimes I feel that actually these arguments are surreptitious ways of ensuring that affluent kids get to still go to school, even if they wouldn't quite do well enough on the exams. The idea that SAT training is a profound effect is a bad one. Studying and prep will improve scores, but not by as much as people seem to think.

whimsicalism 2y ago

Speak for yourself. I was the one who made the original taboo comment and you are simply putting tons of words in my mouth. There are much simpler, much more solid mechanistically scientifically associations that are still taboo to discuss that imo have nothing to do with race (race isn't even a real thing). For instance, a common argument I hear is that "standardized tests are just testing affluence" because the correlation between parental income and standardized test performance is so high. It seems pretty obvious to me that there are potential heritable confounders there, but I would never feel comfortable discussing this publicly. It's also frustrating because people will strongly implicitly weight the evidence by what they want to be true. Anything contrary to what they want to be true gets much stricter scrutiny than the reverse. For instance, "there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot" is simply not an accurate statement of the science. Measurable environmental factors don't explain even remotely close to everything. A lot (or all of the remaining) could just be random variance, but the idea that there just isn't much variance left to explain otherwise is absurdly wrong but people want it to be true.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Enginerrrd 2y ago
Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't intend to say that's what you were saying at all. My hypothetical used the words "you're" and that's just a bad habit of mine, it was not intended to indicate that I thought that you thought that way. I understood what you were saying, and I had no intention of attributing such ill-will to you. I was only trying to explain the logical chain that can lead to the original observation/opinion to be considered a taboo one. For what it's worth, I'm totally on your side, but I was only trying to illustrate the problems with going down that line of thinking, and why some consider it taboo. There are some deep problems in the social sciences right now. The fact that some feel reluctant to discuss things they believe to be true is a bad thing in my opinion because it eliminates the opportunity for counter-arguments to be made and considered. I also think that the arguments on how standardized tests merely test affluence are terrible, and sometimes I feel that actually these arguments are surreptitious ways of ensuring that affluent kids get to still go to school, even if they wouldn't quite do well enough on the exams. The idea that SAT training is a profound effect is a bad one. Studying and prep will improve scores, but not by as much as people seem to think.