It’s hard to know how to respond to this comment, which reveals some fundamental misunderstandings of heritability and of behavior genetics methods. The LessWrong protocol is ‘If you disagree, try getting curious about what your partner is thinking’. But in some cases, people unfamiliar with a field have the same old misconceptions about the field, repeated over and over. So I’m honestly having trouble arousing my curiosity....
The quote from habryka doesn’t make sense to me, and doesn’t seem to understand how behavior genetic studies estimate heritabilities, shared family environment effects, and non-shared effects.
It’s simply not true that ‘heritability would still be significant even in a genetically identical population (since cultural factors are heritable due to shared family environments).’ Cultural factors are not ‘heritable’, by definition. (Here habryka seems to be using some non-scientific notion of ‘heritability’ to mean roughly ‘passed down through families’?)
Also, heritabilities are not ‘upper bounds’ on the effect of genes. Nope. If there is any measurement error in assessing a trait (as there usually is for psychological traits), then an estimated heritability will often be a lower bound on effects of genes. This is why behavior genetics studies will sometimes report a ‘raw heritability’ but also a ‘heritability corrected for measurement error’, which is typically higher.
My point is not to shift your beliefs about genetics, but to show that your conclusions cannot be shown from heritability, since the statistic is incapable of making the claims you want to make.
That doesn’t mean the claims are necessarily wrong (they may be rescued), but that more work is necessary to make the claims that you want to make.
It’s hard to know how to respond to this comment, which reveals some fundamental misunderstandings of heritability and of behavior genetics methods. The LessWrong protocol is ‘If you disagree, try getting curious about what your partner is thinking’. But in some cases, people unfamiliar with a field have the same old misconceptions about the field, repeated over and over. So I’m honestly having trouble arousing my curiosity....
The quote from habryka doesn’t make sense to me, and doesn’t seem to understand how behavior genetic studies estimate heritabilities, shared family environment effects, and non-shared effects.
It’s simply not true that ‘heritability would still be significant even in a genetically identical population (since cultural factors are heritable due to shared family environments).’ Cultural factors are not ‘heritable’, by definition. (Here habryka seems to be using some non-scientific notion of ‘heritability’ to mean roughly ‘passed down through families’?)
Also, heritabilities are not ‘upper bounds’ on the effect of genes. Nope. If there is any measurement error in assessing a trait (as there usually is for psychological traits), then an estimated heritability will often be a lower bound on effects of genes. This is why behavior genetics studies will sometimes report a ‘raw heritability’ but also a ‘heritability corrected for measurement error’, which is typically higher.
My point is not to shift your beliefs about genetics, but to show that your conclusions cannot be shown from heritability, since the statistic is incapable of making the claims you want to make.
That doesn’t mean the claims are necessarily wrong (they may be rescued), but that more work is necessary to make the claims that you want to make.