A fun one which came up recently on IRC: everyone thinks that how your parents raise you is incredibly important, this is so obvious it doesn’t need any proof and is universal common sense (how could influencing and teaching a person from scratch to 18 years old not have deep and profound effects on them?), and you can find extended discussions of the best way to raise kids from Plato’s Republic to Rousseau’s Emile to Spock.
Except twin studies consistently estimate that the influence of ‘shared environment’ (the home) is small or near-zero for many traits compared to genetics and randomness/nonshared-environment.
If you want to predict whether someone will be a smoker or smart, it doesn’t matter whether they’re raised by smokers or not (to borrow an example from The Nurture Assumption*); it just matters whether their biological parents were smokers and whether they get unlucky.
This is so deeply counterintuitive and unexpected that even people who are generally familiar with the relevant topics like IQ or twin studies typically don’t know about this or disbelieve it.
(Another example is probably folk physics: Newtonian motion is true, experimentally confirmed, mathematically logical, and completely unintuitive and took millennia to be developed after the start of mechanics.)
But this interpretation foolishly neglects to consider the genetic component of parent-child similarity. Table 7.2 summarizes reports of two twin studies, an adoptive study, and a family study. In all these studies, the offspring of smokers were adults at the time they were surveyed. Smoking’s heritability averaged 43%, whereas smoking’s rearing environmental variation was close to zero. [Shared rearing variation (c^2): N/A (family, Eysenck (1980)); <0% (Twin, Cannelli, Swan, Robinette, & Fabsilz (1990)); <0% (Twin, Swan, Carmelli, Rosenman, Fabsitz, & Christian (1990)); <0% (Adoptive, Eysenck (1980)); mean: 0%] In other words, effects of rearing variation (e.g. parents’ lighting up or not, or having cigarettes in the home or not) were nil by the time the children had reached adulthood. In Eysenck’s (1980) report on adoptees, the smoking correlation of biologically unrelated parent-child pairs was essentially zero (r = -.02). Parental smoking may influence a childs risk through genetic inheritance: The role of parents is a passive one-providing a set of genes at loci relevant to smoking risk, but not SOCially influencing their offspring.
A fun one which came up recently on IRC: everyone thinks that how your parents raise you is incredibly important, this is so obvious it doesn’t need any proof and is universal common sense, and you can find extended discussions of the best way to raise kids from Plato’s Republic to Rousseau’s Emile to Spock.
Except twin studies consistently estimate that the influence of ‘shared environment’ (the home) is small or near-zero for many traits compared to genetics and randomness/nonshared-environment.
This is quite possibly the most comforting scientific result ever for me as a parent, by the way.
Whereas for me, it’s horrifying, given that my ex-spouse turned out to be an astonishingly horrible person.
I seem to recall Yvain posting a link to something he referred to as the beginnings of a possible rebuttal to The Nurture Assumption; I suppose I shall have to hang my hopes on that.
It may or may not be comforting to reflect that your ex-spouse is probably less horrible than s/he seems to you. (Just on general outside-view principles; I have no knowledge of your situation or your ex.)
‘Shh, kemo sabe—you hear that?’ ‘No; the jungle is silent tonight.’ ‘Yes. The silence of the p-values. A wild publication bias stalks us. We must be cautious’.
So… does it mean that it’s completely irrelevant who adopted Harry Potter, because the results would be the same anyway?
Or is the correct model something like: abuse can change things to worse, but any non-abusive parenting simply means the child will grow up determined by their genes? That is, we have a biologically set “destiny”, and all the environment can do is either help us reach this destiny or somehow cripple us halfway (by abuse, by lack of nutrition, etc.).
Or is the correct model something like: abuse can change things to worse, but any non-abusive parenting simply means the child will grow up determined by their genes? That is, we have a biologically set “destiny”, and all the environment can do is either help us reach this destiny or somehow cripple us halfway (by abuse, by lack of nutrition, etc.).
In an home environment within the normal range for a population, the home environment will matter little in a predictable sense on many traits compared to the genetic legacy, and random events/choices/biological-events/accidents/etc. There are some traits it will matter a lot on, and in a causal sense, the home environment may determine various important outcomes but not in a way that is predictable or easily measured. The other category of ‘nonshared environment’ is often bigger than the genetic legacy, so speaking of a biologically set destiny is misleading: biologically influenced would be a better phrase.
Has this been demonstrated for home environments in the developing world or sub-middle class home environments in the developed world? My prior understanding was that it had not been.
There are serious restriction of range problems with the literature. I believe that there is one small French adoption study with unrestricted range which produced 1 sigma IQ difference between the bottom and top buckets (deciles?) of adopting families.
I wonder if this what Shalizi alludes to when he says that IQ is closer to that of the adoptive parents than that of the biological parents.
I believe that there is one small French adoption study which produced 1 sigma IQ difference between the bottom and top buckets (deciles?) of adopting families.
(Both references describe the same study.) Capron & Duyme found 38 French children placed for adoption before age 2, 20 of them to parents with very high socioeconomic status (operationalized as having 14-23 years of education and working a profession) and 18 to parents with very low socioeconomic status (unskilled & semi-skilled labourers or farmers, with 5-8 years of education). When the kids took the WISC-R IQ test, those adopted into the high-SES families had a mean IQ of 111.6, while those in the low-SES families had a mean IQ of 100.0, for a difference of 0.77 sigma.
So… does it mean that it’s completely irrelevant who adopted Harry Potter, because the results would be the same anyway?
In the context of IQ I’ve seen it claimed that normal variation in parenting doesn’t do much, but extreme abuse can still have a substantial effect. So parenting quality would only make a difference at the tails of the parenting quality distribution, but there it would make quite a difference.
In “No Two Alike” Harris argues that the biggest non-shared environment personality determinant is peer group. So Harry Potter style “Lock him up in a closet with no friends” would actually have a huge effect.
And it should be noted that parents do have control over peer group: where to live, public school vs. private school vs. homeschooling, getting children to join things, etc. So parenting still matters even if it’s all down to genetics and non-shared environment.
Also, has anyone investigated whether the proper response to publicized social-science answers/theories/whatever you want to call them is to assume they’re true or just wait for them to be rejected? That is: how many publicized social-science answers [the same question could be asked for diet-advice answers conflicting with pre-nutrition-studies received wisdom, etc.] were later rejected? It could well be that the right thing to do in general is stick with common sense...
And it should be noted that parents do have control over peer group: where to live, public school vs. private school vs. homeschooling, getting children to join things, etc.
Exactly! If you have something to protect as a parent, then after hearing “parents are unimportant, the important stuff is some non-genetic X” the obvious reaction is: “Okay, so how can I influence X?” (Instead of saying: “Okay, then it’s not my fault, whatever.”)
For example, if I want my children to be non-smokers, and I learn that whether I am smoking or not has much smaller impact than whether my children’s friends are smoking… the obvious next question is: What can I do to increase the probability that my children’s friends will be non-smokers? There are many indirect methods like choosing the place to live, choosing the school, choosing free-time activities, etc. I would just like to have more data on what smoking correlates with; where should I send my children and where should I prevent them from going, so that even if they “naturally” pick their peer group in that place, they will more likely pick non-smokers. (Replace non-smoking with whatever is your parenting goal.)
Shortly, when I read “parenting” in a study, I mentally translate it as: “what an average, non-strategic parent does”. That’s not the same as: “what a parent could do”.
Except twin studies consistently estimate that the influence of ‘shared environment’ (the home) is small or near-zero for many traits compared to genetics and randomness/nonshared-environment.
As Protagoras points out here there are systematic problems with twin studies.
There are problems, but I don’t think they are large, I think they are brought up mostly for ideological reasons (Shalizi is not an unbiased source and has a very big axe to grind), and a lot of the problems also cut the other way. For example, measurement error can reduce estimates of heritability a great deal, as we see in twin studies which correct for it and as predicted get higher heritability estimates, like “Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs”, Hatemi et al 2010 (this study, incidentally, also addresses the claim that twins may have special environments compared to their non-twin siblings and that will bias results, which has been claimed by people who dislike twin studies; there’s no a priori reason to think this, and Hatemi finds no evidence for it, yet they had claimed it).
Shalizi is not an unbiased source and has a very big axe to grind
Do you mean more by this than that he has very strong opinions on this topic? I would guess you do—that you mean there’s something pushing him towards the opinions he has, that isn’t the way it is because those opinions are right. But what?
Shalizi is somewhere around Marxism in politics. This makes his writings on intelligence very frustrating, but on the other hand, it also means he can write very interesting things on economics at times—his essay on Red Plenty is the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen on economics & computational complexity. Horses for courses.
Shalizi states at least part of his position as follows:
“Market socialism” is a current of ideas [...] for how to make extensive use of markets without thereby creating gross economic and political inequality. [...] On the other hand, modern states are powerful enough as things stand; to turn the economy wholly over to them is a bad idea. To combine markets with socialism seems like an elegant and feasible solution, at least technically, and it’s one which I support [...]
and on the same page says these things:
Incredible things were done in the name of [the political control of economic life], some of them noble and heroic (like resistance to Fascism, and the creation of democratic welfare states), others scarcely matched for wickedness (like Stalin’s purges and deliberate famines) and stupidity (like Mao’s Great Leap Forward and apparently unintentional but highly foreseeable famines).
and
The history of socialist movements is [...] bound up with the histories of organized labour, of economics and left-wing politics and general, and, less honourably, with that of revolutions and totalitarianism. [...] it had become clear [...] that they [sc. the Soviets] were far, far worse than capitalist democracies [...]
I have to say that none of this sounds very Marxist to me. Shalizi apparently finds revolutions dishonourable; the most notable attempts at (nominally) Marxist states, the USSR and the PRC, he criticizes in very strong terms; he wants most prices to be set by markets (at least this is how I interpret what he says on that page and others it links to).
Sometime between [1956] and 1968 [...] he [sc. Kolakowski] stopped considering himself a Marxist, even a revisionist one [...] though still a socialist and (I think) an atheist.
followed in the next paragraph by
I think his views of socialism and Marxism are absolutely on-target
which seems to me to imply, in particular, that Shalizi doesn’t consider himself “a Marxist, even a revisionist one”.
He’s certainly a leftist, certainly considers himself a socialist, but he seems quite some way from Marxism. (And further still from, e.g., any position taken by the USSR or the PRC.)
[The ideas of the Frankfurt School] are very extreme examples of ways of thinking about society, both normatively and descriptively, for which I have very little sympathy, yet are closely affiliated to ideas I am receptive to. (E.g.: so far as I can see, they were all what Marxists would call “idealists”, which is not a compliment, yet they claimed to be Marxists, even historical materialists!) My interest in them is thus interest in my notorious and embarrassing ideological cousins...
Not that I think pigeon-holing him is very useful for determining his views on economics or politics, let alone IQ.
This makes his writings on intelligence very frustrating
Does having political views that approximate Marxism imply irrationally-derived views on intelligence? I don’t see why it should, but this may simply be a matter of ignorance or oversight on my part.
I am not an expert on Marx but would be unsurprised to hear that he made a bunch of claims that are ill-supported by evidence and have strong implications about intelligence—say, that The Proletariat is in no way inferior in capabilities, even statistically, to The Bourgeoisie. But to me “somewhere around Marxism in politics” doesn’t mean any kind of commitment to believing everything Marx wrote. It isn’t obvious to me why someone couldn’t hold pretty much any halfway-reasonable opinions about intelligence, while still thinking that it is morally preferable for workers to own the businesses they work for and the equipment they use, that we would collectively be better off with much much more redistribution of wealth than we currently have (or even with the outright abolition of individual property), etc.
In another comment I’ve given my reasons for doubting that Shalizi is even “somewhere around Marxism in politics”. But even if I’m wrong about that, I’m not aware of prior commitments he has that would make him unable to think rationally about intelligence.
Of course it needn’t be a matter of prior commitments as such. It could, e.g., be that he is immersed in generally-very-leftist thought (this being either a cause or a consequence of his own leftishness), and that since for whatever reason there’s substantial correlation between being a leftist and having one set of views about intelligence rather than another, Shalizi has just absorbed a typically-leftist position on intelligence by osmosis. But, again, the fact that he could have doesn’t mean he actually has.
I think the guts of what you’re claiming is: Shalizi’s views on intelligence are a consequence of his political views; either his political views are not arrived at rationally, or the way his political views have given rise to his views on intelligence are not rational, or both. -- That could well be true, but so far what you’ve given evidence for is simply that he holds one particular set of political views. How do you get from there to the stronger claim about the relationship between his views on the two topics?
I think the guts of what you’re claiming is: Shalizi’s views on intelligence are a consequence of his political views; either his political views are not arrived at rationally, or the way his political views have given rise to his views on intelligence are not rational, or both. -- That could well be true, but so far what you’ve given evidence for is simply that he holds one particular set of political views. How do you get from there to the stronger claim about the relationship between his views on the two topics?
At least part of it was reading his ‘Statistical Myth’ essay, being skeptical of the apparent argument for some of the reasons Dalliard would lay out at length years later, reading all the positive discussions of it by people I was unsure understood either psychometrics or Shalizi’s essay (which he helpfully links), and then reading a followup dialogue http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/495.html where—at least, this is how it reads to me—he carefully covers his ass, walks back his claims, and quietly concedes a lot of key points. At that point, I started to seriously wonder if Shalizi could be trusted on this topic; his constant invocation of Stephen Jay Gould (who should be infamous by this point) and his gullible swallowing of ‘deliberate practice’ as more important than any other factor which since has been pretty convincingly debunked (both on display in the dialogue) merely reinforce my impression and the link to Gould (Shalizi’s chief comment on Gould’s Mismeasure of Man is apparently solely “I do not recommend this for the simple reason that I read it in 1988, when I was fourteen. I remember it as a very good book, for whatever that’s worth.”; no word on whether he is bothered by Gould’s fraud) suggests it’s partially ideological. Another revealing page: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/iq.html I can understand disrecommending Rushton, but disrecommending Jensen who invented a lot of the field and whose foes even admire him? Recommending a journalist from 1922? Recommending some priming bullshit? (Where’s the fierce methodologist statistician when you need him...?) There’s one consistent criterion he applies: if it’s against IQ and anything to do with it, he recommends it, and if it’s for it, he disrecommends it. Apparently only foes of it ever have any of the truth.
I believe his political views are somewhere between way to the left of the Democratic Party and socialism. He dislikes the entire field of intelligence research in psychology because it’s ideologically inconvenient. He criticises anything that he can find to criticise about it. Think of him as Stephen Jay Gould, but much smarter and more honest.
See, this is a place where the US is different from Europe. Because over here (at least in the bit of Europe I’m in), being “somewhere to the right of socialism” isn’t thought of as the kind of crazy extremism that ipso facto makes someone dangerously biased and axe-grindy.
Now, of course politics is what it is, and affiliation with even the most moderate and reasonable political position can make otherwise sensible people completely blind to what’s obvious to others. So the fact that being almost (but not quite) a socialist looks to me like a perfectly normal and sensible position is perfectly compatible with Shalizi being made nuts by it. But to me “he’s somewhere to the left of Barack Obama” doesn’t look on its own like something that makes someone a biased source and explains what their problem is.
Yup, that’s a good point. (Though it depends on what “local” means. I have the impression that academics in the US tend to be leftier than the population at large.)
Academia in the US is much leftier than the population at large. I believe it was Jonathan Haidt who went looking for examples of social conservatives in his field and people kept nomimating Philip Tetlock who would not describe himself thus. At a conference Dr.Haidt was looking for a show of hands for various political positions. Republicans were substantially less popular than Communists. Psychology is about as left wing as sociology and disciplines vary but academia is a great deal to the left of the US general population.
A fun one which came up recently on IRC: everyone thinks that how your parents raise you is incredibly important, this is so obvious it doesn’t need any proof and is universal common sense (how could influencing and teaching a person from scratch to 18 years old not have deep and profound effects on them?), and you can find extended discussions of the best way to raise kids from Plato’s Republic to Rousseau’s Emile to Spock.
Except twin studies consistently estimate that the influence of ‘shared environment’ (the home) is small or near-zero for many traits compared to genetics and randomness/nonshared-environment.
If you want to predict whether someone will be a smoker or smart, it doesn’t matter whether they’re raised by smokers or not (to borrow an example from The Nurture Assumption*); it just matters whether their biological parents were smokers and whether they get unlucky.
This is so deeply counterintuitive and unexpected that even people who are generally familiar with the relevant topics like IQ or twin studies typically don’t know about this or disbelieve it.
(Another example is probably folk physics: Newtonian motion is true, experimentally confirmed, mathematically logical, and completely unintuitive and took millennia to be developed after the start of mechanics.)
* Rich’s citation is to Rowe 1994, The Limits of Family Influence: Genes, Experience, and Behavior; from pg204:
This is quite possibly the most comforting scientific result ever for me as a parent, by the way.
Whereas for me, it’s horrifying, given that my ex-spouse turned out to be an astonishingly horrible person.
I seem to recall Yvain posting a link to something he referred to as the beginnings of a possible rebuttal to The Nurture Assumption; I suppose I shall have to hang my hopes on that.
It may or may not be comforting to reflect that your ex-spouse is probably less horrible than s/he seems to you. (Just on general outside-view principles; I have no knowledge of your situation or your ex.)
You feared more than you hoped, eh?
Old epi jungle saying: “the causal null is generally true.”
‘Shh, kemo sabe—you hear that?’ ‘No; the jungle is silent tonight.’ ‘Yes. The silence of the p-values. A wild publication bias stalks us. We must be cautious’.
What is IRC?
Get off my lawn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_relay_chat
So… does it mean that it’s completely irrelevant who adopted Harry Potter, because the results would be the same anyway?
Or is the correct model something like: abuse can change things to worse, but any non-abusive parenting simply means the child will grow up determined by their genes? That is, we have a biologically set “destiny”, and all the environment can do is either help us reach this destiny or somehow cripple us halfway (by abuse, by lack of nutrition, etc.).
In an home environment within the normal range for a population, the home environment will matter little in a predictable sense on many traits compared to the genetic legacy, and random events/choices/biological-events/accidents/etc. There are some traits it will matter a lot on, and in a causal sense, the home environment may determine various important outcomes but not in a way that is predictable or easily measured. The other category of ‘nonshared environment’ is often bigger than the genetic legacy, so speaking of a biologically set destiny is misleading: biologically influenced would be a better phrase.
Has this been demonstrated for home environments in the developing world or sub-middle class home environments in the developed world? My prior understanding was that it had not been.
There are serious restriction of range problems with the literature. I believe that there is one small French adoption study with unrestricted range which produced 1 sigma IQ difference between the bottom and top buckets (deciles?) of adopting families.
I wonder if this what Shalizi alludes to when he says that IQ is closer to that of the adoptive parents than that of the biological parents.
Christiane Capron & Michel Duyme (1989), “Assessment of effects of socio-economic status on IQ in a full cross-fostering study”, Nature, 340, 552-554
Christiane Capron & Michel Duyme (1996), “Effect of Socioeconomic Status of Biological and Adoptive Parents on WISC-R Subtest Scores of their French Adopted Children”, Intelligence, 22, 259-275
(Both references describe the same study.) Capron & Duyme found 38 French children placed for adoption before age 2, 20 of them to parents with very high socioeconomic status (operationalized as having 14-23 years of education and working a profession) and 18 to parents with very low socioeconomic status (unskilled & semi-skilled labourers or farmers, with 5-8 years of education). When the kids took the WISC-R IQ test, those adopted into the high-SES families had a mean IQ of 111.6, while those in the low-SES families had a mean IQ of 100.0, for a difference of 0.77 sigma.
Thanks!
In the context of IQ I’ve seen it claimed that normal variation in parenting doesn’t do much, but extreme abuse can still have a substantial effect. So parenting quality would only make a difference at the tails of the parenting quality distribution, but there it would make quite a difference.
In “No Two Alike” Harris argues that the biggest non-shared environment personality determinant is peer group. So Harry Potter style “Lock him up in a closet with no friends” would actually have a huge effect.
And it should be noted that parents do have control over peer group: where to live, public school vs. private school vs. homeschooling, getting children to join things, etc. So parenting still matters even if it’s all down to genetics and non-shared environment.
Also, has anyone investigated whether the proper response to publicized social-science answers/theories/whatever you want to call them is to assume they’re true or just wait for them to be rejected? That is: how many publicized social-science answers [the same question could be asked for diet-advice answers conflicting with pre-nutrition-studies received wisdom, etc.] were later rejected? It could well be that the right thing to do in general is stick with common sense...
Exactly! If you have something to protect as a parent, then after hearing “parents are unimportant, the important stuff is some non-genetic X” the obvious reaction is: “Okay, so how can I influence X?” (Instead of saying: “Okay, then it’s not my fault, whatever.”)
For example, if I want my children to be non-smokers, and I learn that whether I am smoking or not has much smaller impact than whether my children’s friends are smoking… the obvious next question is: What can I do to increase the probability that my children’s friends will be non-smokers? There are many indirect methods like choosing the place to live, choosing the school, choosing free-time activities, etc. I would just like to have more data on what smoking correlates with; where should I send my children and where should I prevent them from going, so that even if they “naturally” pick their peer group in that place, they will more likely pick non-smokers. (Replace non-smoking with whatever is your parenting goal.)
Shortly, when I read “parenting” in a study, I mentally translate it as: “what an average, non-strategic parent does”. That’s not the same as: “what a parent could do”.
Fictional evidence, etc. Also, HPMOR has confounders, like a differing mechanism for Horcruxes.
As Protagoras points out here there are systematic problems with twin studies.
There are problems, but I don’t think they are large, I think they are brought up mostly for ideological reasons (Shalizi is not an unbiased source and has a very big axe to grind), and a lot of the problems also cut the other way. For example, measurement error can reduce estimates of heritability a great deal, as we see in twin studies which correct for it and as predicted get higher heritability estimates, like “Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs”, Hatemi et al 2010 (this study, incidentally, also addresses the claim that twins may have special environments compared to their non-twin siblings and that will bias results, which has been claimed by people who dislike twin studies; there’s no a priori reason to think this, and Hatemi finds no evidence for it, yet they had claimed it).
Do you mean more by this than that he has very strong opinions on this topic? I would guess you do—that you mean there’s something pushing him towards the opinions he has, that isn’t the way it is because those opinions are right. But what?
Shalizi is somewhere around Marxism in politics. This makes his writings on intelligence very frustrating, but on the other hand, it also means he can write very interesting things on economics at times—his essay on Red Plenty is the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen on economics & computational complexity. Horses for courses.
Shalizi states at least part of his position as follows:
and on the same page says these things:
and
I have to say that none of this sounds very Marxist to me. Shalizi apparently finds revolutions dishonourable; the most notable attempts at (nominally) Marxist states, the USSR and the PRC, he criticizes in very strong terms; he wants most prices to be set by markets (at least this is how I interpret what he says on that page and others it links to).
Oh, here’s another bit of evidence:
followed in the next paragraph by
which seems to me to imply, in particular, that Shalizi doesn’t consider himself “a Marxist, even a revisionist one”.
He’s certainly a leftist, certainly considers himself a socialist, but he seems quite some way from Marxism. (And further still from, e.g., any position taken by the USSR or the PRC.)
How about this?
Not that I think pigeon-holing him is very useful for determining his views on economics or politics, let alone IQ.
Suggests that Marxism is an idea Shalizi is “receptive to” but not (at least to me) that he’s actually a Marxist as such.
Does having political views that approximate Marxism imply irrationally-derived views on intelligence? I don’t see why it should, but this may simply be a matter of ignorance or oversight on my part.
I am not an expert on Marx but would be unsurprised to hear that he made a bunch of claims that are ill-supported by evidence and have strong implications about intelligence—say, that The Proletariat is in no way inferior in capabilities, even statistically, to The Bourgeoisie. But to me “somewhere around Marxism in politics” doesn’t mean any kind of commitment to believing everything Marx wrote. It isn’t obvious to me why someone couldn’t hold pretty much any halfway-reasonable opinions about intelligence, while still thinking that it is morally preferable for workers to own the businesses they work for and the equipment they use, that we would collectively be better off with much much more redistribution of wealth than we currently have (or even with the outright abolition of individual property), etc.
In another comment I’ve given my reasons for doubting that Shalizi is even “somewhere around Marxism in politics”. But even if I’m wrong about that, I’m not aware of prior commitments he has that would make him unable to think rationally about intelligence.
Of course it needn’t be a matter of prior commitments as such. It could, e.g., be that he is immersed in generally-very-leftist thought (this being either a cause or a consequence of his own leftishness), and that since for whatever reason there’s substantial correlation between being a leftist and having one set of views about intelligence rather than another, Shalizi has just absorbed a typically-leftist position on intelligence by osmosis. But, again, the fact that he could have doesn’t mean he actually has.
I think the guts of what you’re claiming is: Shalizi’s views on intelligence are a consequence of his political views; either his political views are not arrived at rationally, or the way his political views have given rise to his views on intelligence are not rational, or both. -- That could well be true, but so far what you’ve given evidence for is simply that he holds one particular set of political views. How do you get from there to the stronger claim about the relationship between his views on the two topics?
At least part of it was reading his ‘Statistical Myth’ essay, being skeptical of the apparent argument for some of the reasons Dalliard would lay out at length years later, reading all the positive discussions of it by people I was unsure understood either psychometrics or Shalizi’s essay (which he helpfully links), and then reading a followup dialogue http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/495.html where—at least, this is how it reads to me—he carefully covers his ass, walks back his claims, and quietly concedes a lot of key points. At that point, I started to seriously wonder if Shalizi could be trusted on this topic; his constant invocation of Stephen Jay Gould (who should be infamous by this point) and his gullible swallowing of ‘deliberate practice’ as more important than any other factor which since has been pretty convincingly debunked (both on display in the dialogue) merely reinforce my impression and the link to Gould (Shalizi’s chief comment on Gould’s Mismeasure of Man is apparently solely “I do not recommend this for the simple reason that I read it in 1988, when I was fourteen. I remember it as a very good book, for whatever that’s worth.”; no word on whether he is bothered by Gould’s fraud) suggests it’s partially ideological. Another revealing page: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/iq.html I can understand disrecommending Rushton, but disrecommending Jensen who invented a lot of the field and whose foes even admire him? Recommending a journalist from 1922? Recommending some priming bullshit? (Where’s the fierce methodologist statistician when you need him...?) There’s one consistent criterion he applies: if it’s against IQ and anything to do with it, he recommends it, and if it’s for it, he disrecommends it. Apparently only foes of it ever have any of the truth.
Informative. Thanks! Though I must admit that my reaction to the pages of Shalizi that you cite isn’t the same as yours.
I believe his political views are somewhere between way to the left of the Democratic Party and socialism. He dislikes the entire field of intelligence research in psychology because it’s ideologically inconvenient. He criticises anything that he can find to criticise about it. Think of him as Stephen Jay Gould, but much smarter and more honest.
See, this is a place where the US is different from Europe. Because over here (at least in the bit of Europe I’m in), being “somewhere to the right of socialism” isn’t thought of as the kind of crazy extremism that ipso facto makes someone dangerously biased and axe-grindy.
Now, of course politics is what it is, and affiliation with even the most moderate and reasonable political position can make otherwise sensible people completely blind to what’s obvious to others. So the fact that being almost (but not quite) a socialist looks to me like a perfectly normal and sensible position is perfectly compatible with Shalizi being made nuts by it. But to me “he’s somewhere to the left of Barack Obama” doesn’t look on its own like something that makes someone a biased source and explains what their problem is.
Being an extremist by local standards may be more relevant than actual beliefs.
Yup, that’s a good point. (Though it depends on what “local” means. I have the impression that academics in the US tend to be leftier than the population at large.)
Academia in the US is much leftier than the population at large. I believe it was Jonathan Haidt who went looking for examples of social conservatives in his field and people kept nomimating Philip Tetlock who would not describe himself thus. At a conference Dr.Haidt was looking for a show of hands for various political positions. Republicans were substantially less popular than Communists. Psychology is about as left wing as sociology and disciplines vary but academia is a great deal to the left of the US general population.