Turkheimer picks the weirdest examples for his slippery slope fallacies. "The IQ gap is just the one that we’re used to talking about. But Japanese people are more introverted on personality measures than Americans are — and so is that on the table now?"
Sure, why not? I can imagine a possible world in which this difference is purely genetic, and I can imagine a possible world in which this difference is purely environmental, as well as various degrees of intermediate causation. Importantly, these different possible worlds do not look exactly the same. You could study this using a variety of methods: polygenic scores, adoption studies, admixture studies, and comparisons of descendant groups living in different countries. If you did all that, it would probably give you a better idea about what is actually true about the world, whichever explanation it is. (For what it's worth, I'm convinced there are pretty large cultural effects on East Asian-European introversion differences, regardless of whether or not there is also a genetic component. The Asians and Asian-Americans I've known have often had quite different personalities. If you walk around a large city or university campus in the US, you can look at ethnically Asian people from a distance and quite often guess correctly whether they will have a foreign or American accent before you can hear their voices. The clothes are different on average, but so are the facial expressions, body postures, etc. Those who grew up in America have a more socially open demeanor.)
I remember at some point seeing Turkheimer claim that research on genetic population differences in IQ was bad because: oh no, what if someone tried to make the same claim about population differences in alcoholism being genetic? From my perspective, why wouldn't we want to know that? A drink or two socially is fun. Alcohol addiction ruins your life and the lives of those around you. Twin studies indicate there is a strong genetic component to someone's risk of alcoholism. Isn't it better if individuals can get genetic tests and know what their risk is? Isn't it better if certain populations can know that, on average, they are at higher risk for alcoholism? If there are no genetic differences in this trait between populations, then we can study the environmental factors that cause it to vary. Maybe figure out how we can shape our environments to be more like the French and Italians, who drink plenty but rarely seem to get addicted. But if, say, Native Americans have a much higher risk of alcoholism than Italians, then telling them they just need to drink like Italians will not be doing them any favors. If they replicate the same environment exactly, they'll still have different results. Alcoholism can lead to cirrhosis, cancer, car accidents, domestic violence, criminal records, and birth defects. Fortunately, the genetics of alcoholism risk presents an easy gene-environment interaction: if you never start drinking, you won't get addicted. Why on earth wouldn't we want accurate information about people's genetic propensity for alcoholism, both at the individual and population level, so they can make informed choices?
Group differences in alcoholism are clearly genetic, because they differ in rates of 'Asian' flush syndrome, which makes alcoholism very difficult. In fact, one of the most effective treatments against alcoholism is a drug (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfiram) that gives you temporary Asian flush syndrome (aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 deficiency).
I wonder what other drugs could be developed based on actual genetic work on population differences. Could studies of Mediterranean Europeans lead to a drug that reduces the risk of alcoholism and other health consequences without making moderate drinking unpleasant? I'm not too optimistic about an intelligence-increasing drug coming out of research on the genetic basis of intelligence, as I expect there are just too many genes causing tiny effects on diverse mechanisms, but you never know. If Cochran is right and the Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick disease alleles cause substantial heterozygote advantages in intelligence, then perhaps that would suggest possible nootropic drugs. I wouldn't get my hopes up, but we'll never know if we don't do the research.
This seems like only slightly better than the usual slop. As is typically the case with this genre, the author mostly refuses to engage with the actual arguments and evidence of the people he's writing about.
But I did learn some new things. For example, I learned that Sophie von Stumm is "very torn" about being at the same conference with some hereditarians. That's disappointing - I thought she would be more chill. Kudos, though, to James Lee for refusing to participate in this farce.
Yes, they mostly sidestep issues, they just repeat that polygenic scores are not equally predictive. All hereditarians know this and have been discussing it for 10+ years. It's not really relevant in itself because predictive validity equality is not a requirement for group means to work. https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/polygenic-score-validity-and-group
The Chinese began formally sorting themselves by IQ when Emperor Wu of Han (141–87 BC) expanded and formalized the Imperial Examination system. Before his reign, government positions were mostly filled through aristocratic recommendations or family connections, which locked out lower classes like peasants. Around 134 BCE, he adopted the advice of Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu to set up a merit-based system tied to Confucian teachings. This opened the door for talented individuals, including peasants, to take exams and potentially rise to official positions based on their abilities rather than their birth.
Today you need a 140 IQ to get an interview for a career-track national Civil Service entry-level job. Tier One Cities have significantly higher median IQs than Tier Two, etc..
The problem with the Chinese civil service exam was that, rather than using it purely as a sortition mechanism to find the best and brightest in the country, it was instead used solely to dole out the limited resource of civil service spots. The test was also much less g-loaded, on account of being much more study-intensive, than the tests developed in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Indeed, the modern standardized tests are so reliable and so g-loaded that the only reason we don't use them for everything is because of awful commies who don't like the results the tests show. Plus, you ideally don't even study for them, so no more wasting your life on tedious study so you can have a 1% chance at being a Mandarin. If the Chinese Empire used g-loaded, modern-style tests from the beginning, for such purposes as I have outlined, the Qing Dynasty would likely still be surviving into this day.
It's shameful that we let such awful people ruin so many lives, and so much of the economy, for such stupid reasons.
Race and IQ are no more correlated than charisma and hazel eyes. Enough hazel-eyed people are shy, awkward, and feckless, that if you met 50 who were effectively outgoing it would predict nothing. I don’t know why this is such a fascinating topic. Do you believe we’re victims of preference falsification? Would you at all be surprised to learn that the best of us who are heterodox, and thinking, scientists and researchers, alike, have not arrived at these conclusions? The conclusion itself is divination. The data on this topic is based on missing data, that no one ever presents to even arrive at a hypothesis. This is like doing inference on the world after watching cable news. Very ‘if P then Q.’ It always smells to me like people more frustrated with explaining remote group complexity, and their “unpalatable” behaviors, than enlightened by uncomfortable stereotypes that have causal let alone predictive power.
This "undark" group sounds scary. What does that mean, "undark"? What does it mean when they say, "undark Europa, and relight the skin of our race"? Sounds genocidal to me. Is anyone looking into these guys?
Turkheimer picks the weirdest examples for his slippery slope fallacies. "The IQ gap is just the one that we’re used to talking about. But Japanese people are more introverted on personality measures than Americans are — and so is that on the table now?"
Sure, why not? I can imagine a possible world in which this difference is purely genetic, and I can imagine a possible world in which this difference is purely environmental, as well as various degrees of intermediate causation. Importantly, these different possible worlds do not look exactly the same. You could study this using a variety of methods: polygenic scores, adoption studies, admixture studies, and comparisons of descendant groups living in different countries. If you did all that, it would probably give you a better idea about what is actually true about the world, whichever explanation it is. (For what it's worth, I'm convinced there are pretty large cultural effects on East Asian-European introversion differences, regardless of whether or not there is also a genetic component. The Asians and Asian-Americans I've known have often had quite different personalities. If you walk around a large city or university campus in the US, you can look at ethnically Asian people from a distance and quite often guess correctly whether they will have a foreign or American accent before you can hear their voices. The clothes are different on average, but so are the facial expressions, body postures, etc. Those who grew up in America have a more socially open demeanor.)
I remember at some point seeing Turkheimer claim that research on genetic population differences in IQ was bad because: oh no, what if someone tried to make the same claim about population differences in alcoholism being genetic? From my perspective, why wouldn't we want to know that? A drink or two socially is fun. Alcohol addiction ruins your life and the lives of those around you. Twin studies indicate there is a strong genetic component to someone's risk of alcoholism. Isn't it better if individuals can get genetic tests and know what their risk is? Isn't it better if certain populations can know that, on average, they are at higher risk for alcoholism? If there are no genetic differences in this trait between populations, then we can study the environmental factors that cause it to vary. Maybe figure out how we can shape our environments to be more like the French and Italians, who drink plenty but rarely seem to get addicted. But if, say, Native Americans have a much higher risk of alcoholism than Italians, then telling them they just need to drink like Italians will not be doing them any favors. If they replicate the same environment exactly, they'll still have different results. Alcoholism can lead to cirrhosis, cancer, car accidents, domestic violence, criminal records, and birth defects. Fortunately, the genetics of alcoholism risk presents an easy gene-environment interaction: if you never start drinking, you won't get addicted. Why on earth wouldn't we want accurate information about people's genetic propensity for alcoholism, both at the individual and population level, so they can make informed choices?
Group differences in alcoholism are clearly genetic, because they differ in rates of 'Asian' flush syndrome, which makes alcoholism very difficult. In fact, one of the most effective treatments against alcoholism is a drug (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfiram) that gives you temporary Asian flush syndrome (aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 deficiency).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_flush_reaction
I wonder what other drugs could be developed based on actual genetic work on population differences. Could studies of Mediterranean Europeans lead to a drug that reduces the risk of alcoholism and other health consequences without making moderate drinking unpleasant? I'm not too optimistic about an intelligence-increasing drug coming out of research on the genetic basis of intelligence, as I expect there are just too many genes causing tiny effects on diverse mechanisms, but you never know. If Cochran is right and the Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick disease alleles cause substantial heterozygote advantages in intelligence, then perhaps that would suggest possible nootropic drugs. I wouldn't get my hopes up, but we'll never know if we don't do the research.
This seems like only slightly better than the usual slop. As is typically the case with this genre, the author mostly refuses to engage with the actual arguments and evidence of the people he's writing about.
But I did learn some new things. For example, I learned that Sophie von Stumm is "very torn" about being at the same conference with some hereditarians. That's disappointing - I thought she would be more chill. Kudos, though, to James Lee for refusing to participate in this farce.
James Lee wrote this piece earlier https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there
Yes, they mostly sidestep issues, they just repeat that polygenic scores are not equally predictive. All hereditarians know this and have been discussing it for 10+ years. It's not really relevant in itself because predictive validity equality is not a requirement for group means to work. https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/polygenic-score-validity-and-group
The Chinese began formally sorting themselves by IQ when Emperor Wu of Han (141–87 BC) expanded and formalized the Imperial Examination system. Before his reign, government positions were mostly filled through aristocratic recommendations or family connections, which locked out lower classes like peasants. Around 134 BCE, he adopted the advice of Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu to set up a merit-based system tied to Confucian teachings. This opened the door for talented individuals, including peasants, to take exams and potentially rise to official positions based on their abilities rather than their birth.
Today you need a 140 IQ to get an interview for a career-track national Civil Service entry-level job. Tier One Cities have significantly higher median IQs than Tier Two, etc..
The problem with the Chinese civil service exam was that, rather than using it purely as a sortition mechanism to find the best and brightest in the country, it was instead used solely to dole out the limited resource of civil service spots. The test was also much less g-loaded, on account of being much more study-intensive, than the tests developed in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Indeed, the modern standardized tests are so reliable and so g-loaded that the only reason we don't use them for everything is because of awful commies who don't like the results the tests show. Plus, you ideally don't even study for them, so no more wasting your life on tedious study so you can have a 1% chance at being a Mandarin. If the Chinese Empire used g-loaded, modern-style tests from the beginning, for such purposes as I have outlined, the Qing Dynasty would likely still be surviving into this day.
It's shameful that we let such awful people ruin so many lives, and so much of the economy, for such stupid reasons.
There are some who reject reality.
Some? Many!
Race and IQ are no more correlated than charisma and hazel eyes. Enough hazel-eyed people are shy, awkward, and feckless, that if you met 50 who were effectively outgoing it would predict nothing. I don’t know why this is such a fascinating topic. Do you believe we’re victims of preference falsification? Would you at all be surprised to learn that the best of us who are heterodox, and thinking, scientists and researchers, alike, have not arrived at these conclusions? The conclusion itself is divination. The data on this topic is based on missing data, that no one ever presents to even arrive at a hypothesis. This is like doing inference on the world after watching cable news. Very ‘if P then Q.’ It always smells to me like people more frustrated with explaining remote group complexity, and their “unpalatable” behaviors, than enlightened by uncomfortable stereotypes that have causal let alone predictive power.
This "undark" group sounds scary. What does that mean, "undark"? What does it mean when they say, "undark Europa, and relight the skin of our race"? Sounds genocidal to me. Is anyone looking into these guys?
My guess the idea is to throw light on dark matters. It's an activist journalist group. https://undark.org/funding-transparency
Mr. Smart sports a beard, proof that he himself has white European DNA.