After the survey I’ve become confused about what it means for HBD to be false. Should any difference between two separated populations be completely environmental? I believe it’s an antiprediction to think it’s not. I would bet that the “genetic potential” for any complex trait will be slightly different on average between different populations even if we are talking about two neighboring cities. Even if they started out as copies of each other just a few generations ago. I also believe that the differences are small and are mostly irrelevant to any real world problem.
If it’s HBD, how does a person argue that it’s false? And how does someone argue that believing it makes someone a bad person?
After the survey I’ve become confused about what it means for HBD to be false. Should any difference between two separated populations be completely environmental? I believe it’s an antiprediction to think it’s not. I would bet that the “genetic potential” for any complex trait will be slightly different on average between different populations even if we are talking about two neighboring cities. Even if they started out as copies of each other just a few generations ago.
This looks to me like you have a fairly good view of what it would look like for HBD to be false. That is, there would be no meaningful biological diversity among humans, and the idea of people with different levels of intelligence would be as outlandish as the idea of people with different number of eyes. I mean, we don’t expect that to vary between two neighboring cities, and even though there are some people who have something other than five fingers per hand, that’s also something we would expect to only barely vary between cities, and so on.
After the survey I’ve become confused about what it means for HBD to be false.
I don’t think the survey asks that question. Just like it doesn’t ask whether feminism or social justice are false. Those are cultural movements that can’t simply be understood by boiling issues down to one sentence.
I also believe that the differences are small and are mostly irrelevant to any real world problem.
The question was:
“115. How would you describe your opinion of the idea of “human biodiversity”, as you understand the term? No Wiki page available, but essentially it is the belief that there are important genetic differences between human populations and that therefore ideas generally considered racist, such as different races having different average intelligence or personality traits, are in fact scientifically justified”.
No matter how we clusterize people into races, unless it’s some kind of a good randomization procedure I think the probability of their average traits being exactly equal is really small. I’m much less sure it’s scientifically justified to say so as I don’t know much about the state of research there.
I maybe kind of missed the “important” word there. Still...
No matter how we clusterize people into races, unless it’s some kind of a good randomization procedure I think the probability of their average traits being exactly equal is really small.
Scientific debates are never about whether two groups are “exactly equal”. The notion that the question is about whether something is “exactly equal” ignores the core about what the debate is about.
Important is indeed an important word in the sentence.
When trying to understand writing, don’t go for the strawman. Try to understand what could be meant. What differences in beliefs in the question about? It’s not a hard question if you look at it with genuine interest of understanding it.
When trying to understand writing, don’t go for the strawman. Try to understand what could be meant.
I try to, but here I could be overcompensating from sometimes “going too deep” with questions like that. If the question was “Do you believe interpopulational genetic differences in mental abilities or character traits are large enough to be a factor in policy making”, I’d answer “No” and maybe even “Hell no, for a multinational population”. But that seems like a very different question.
I don’t think “ignoring the context” is well described as going deep. Part of critical reading is to think about why someone writes what they write instead just trying to focus on the literal meaning of words. It’s rather only engaging with the surface.
It’s ignoring the context that can be described as not going deep enough. My other usual algorithm “if the question seems easy, look for a deeper meaning” is not without its faults either. Btw, what the context of a single question that asks me to describe my opinion of something as I understand the term actually is?
Alright, I got it, I fail critical reading forever. Yet. Growth mindset. What was the real meaning?
People in our society differ in how they think about genetic differences. There are people who think that race matters a great deal and other you think it doesn’t matter. It’s useful to have a metric that distinguishes those people.
If you have that metric you can ask interesting questions such as whether people who are well calibrated are more likely to score high on that metric.
It’s interesting whether the metric changes from year to year.
That means the question tries to point at a property that people disagree about. In this case it’s whether genetic differences are important. The question doesn’t define “important” but there are various right wing people such as neoreocons and red-pill-folks who identify with the term “human biodiversity”. The question doesn’t try to ask for a specific well-defined belief but points to that cluster of beliefs. It’s the same way that the feminism question doesn’t point to a well-defined belief. You don’t need a well-defined belief to get valuable information from a poll.
The question made it into the the survey because I complained about the usage of tribal labels such as liberal/conversative where people have to pick one choice as a way to measure political beliefs. I argued that focusing on agreement on issues is more meaningful and provides better data.
There are people who think that race matters a great deal and other you think it doesn’t matter. It’s useful to have a metric that distinguishes those people.
What about people who think that neither of these positions is defensible? Well, I suppose you wouldn’t go wrong by calling them metacontrarians.
Sure, I would still bet they’re going to be statistically significant if we get millions of people into the dataset. They may also have some important consequences in real life (a higher resistance to a specific disease may be important for a person with some usually small probability. A population of million that is more resistant to the disease than it could be is about million times that important). It just shouldn’t influence policies much. Though it can make a difference in healthcare… well, no. It actually can influence some policies and economic results for countries with different populations. Lactose tolerance may have effects on agriculture and the export structure, especially long term. The question singles out intelligence and personality traits for no apparent reasons but controversy, being hard to measure and being on the spiritual side of dualism. And probably being more involved in our ideas of human worthiness than height is.
I am not sure what are you arguing. The fact that there are important genetic differences between populations at the medical level is uncontroversial. The controversial issue is whether these differences, as some people put it, “stop at the neck”.
the question singles out intelligence and personality traits for no apparent reasons but controversy
Nope, there are apparent reasons. Intelligence of the populations is massively, hugely important, much more so than lactose intolerance or propensity for exotic diseases. See e.g. this or this.
Not really arguing anything. I’m asking if there is a rational non-meta reason to believe they do “stop at the neck” even if we throw away all the IQ/nations data.
Thanks for the reason I’ve missed. Are personal traits as important?
I’m asking if there is a rational non-meta reason to believe they do “stop at the neck” even if we throw away all the IQ/nations data.
Of course there are. The standard argument is that the history of human evolution suggests that increased intelligence and favorable personality traits were strongly selected for, and traits which are strongly selected tend to reach fixation rather quickly.
But then the difference in intelligence would be almost completely shared + nonshared environment. And twin studies suggest it’s very inheritable. It also seems to be a polygenic trait, so there can be quite a lot of new mutations there that haven’t yet reached fixation even if it’s strongly selected for.
I’m asking if there is a rational non-meta reason to believe they do “stop at the neck”
Not to my knowledge.
Are personal traits as important?
That is a more controversial subject. They are clearly less important than intelligence, but things like time preference (what kind of trade-offs do you make between a smaller reward now and a bigger reward later) or, say, propensity for violence got to be at least somewhat important.
I don’t know too much about HBD, but I would guess that the most important trait for them is intelligence. And maybe aggressivity, impulse control, ability to cooperate with non-relatives, and this kind of necessary-for-civilization things. (You can ignore other traits, such as eye color or lactose tolerance, they don’t make a big difference in modern society. So you’ll buy a different box of milk, big deal.)
Mathematically speaking, if you could measure something to million decimal places, it is very unlikely that the averages for different populations would be exactly the same. But in real life, a difference of 1 IQ point does not make a huge difference. So the question is whether the differences are large enough to matter in real life.
Humanity split from our common origin about 10000 years ago. It seems like enough time to make significant changes; for example, mere 1 IQ point per century could accumulate to a difference of dozens of IQ points below distant populations. On the other hand, humans were already shaped by evolution millenia before they split, so maybe most possibilities of cheaply gaining yet another IQ point were already exhausted before we split. I don’t feel certain enough to make a hypothesis either way.
So we should solve this question empirically, and then we get into problems—the old research was unreliable, and the new one is not done for political reasons. So I still feel like the answer could go either way.
This question is solved empirically. If you look at the data it’s really obvious. There is NO serious research which claims that all populations have essentially the same IQ.
Humanity split from our common origin about 10000 years ago.
Am I reading the linked example correctly, that Asian-Americans’ IQ keeps growing during the last decade, and everyone else’s IQ in USA keeps dropping?
I mean, if you assume that the differences is SAT scores between races reflect their differences in IQ, it seems reasonable to assume that the differences in SAT scores between now and ten years ago reflect the differences in IQ between now and ten years ago. (Either that, or SAT also reflects something else beyond IQ.)
First, look at the magnitudes. The difference between Asians and blacks is about 380 points in 2015. Compared to that number the declines (-6 to −28) are very minor.
Second, while I don’t have data at hand, I strongly suspect that the Asian population of SAT takers changed during the last decade. In particular, the upper class of China got wealthy enough and “international” enough to start sending their kids to US universities (which usually involves taking the SAT) and that’s besides increased immigration from China in general.
Third, SAT is a proxy for IQ and it’s not a stable test. It’s being tweaked and adjusted constantly. Among other things, SAT is normalized so that the score of 500 corresponds to about the 50th percentile of test-takers. If you have a influx of smarter-than-average kids, they will not only push their subgroup scores up, they will also push everyone else’s scores down.
The SAT scores from different years are somewhat comparable (because they are normalized), but not fully comparable because the tests from these different years are literally different. That’s not a problem for comparing the performance of subgroups in any given year, though.
After the survey I’ve become confused about what it means for HBD to be false. Should any difference between two separated populations be completely environmental? I believe it’s an antiprediction to think it’s not. I would bet that the “genetic potential” for any complex trait will be slightly different on average between different populations even if we are talking about two neighboring cities. Even if they started out as copies of each other just a few generations ago. I also believe that the differences are small and are mostly irrelevant to any real world problem. If it’s HBD, how does a person argue that it’s false? And how does someone argue that believing it makes someone a bad person?
This looks to me like you have a fairly good view of what it would look like for HBD to be false. That is, there would be no meaningful biological diversity among humans, and the idea of people with different levels of intelligence would be as outlandish as the idea of people with different number of eyes. I mean, we don’t expect that to vary between two neighboring cities, and even though there are some people who have something other than five fingers per hand, that’s also something we would expect to only barely vary between cities, and so on.
I don’t think the survey asks that question. Just like it doesn’t ask whether feminism or social justice are false. Those are cultural movements that can’t simply be understood by boiling issues down to one sentence.
The HBD crowd doesn’t.
The question was: “115. How would you describe your opinion of the idea of “human biodiversity”, as you understand the term? No Wiki page available, but essentially it is the belief that there are important genetic differences between human populations and that therefore ideas generally considered racist, such as different races having different average intelligence or personality traits, are in fact scientifically justified”.
No matter how we clusterize people into races, unless it’s some kind of a good randomization procedure I think the probability of their average traits being exactly equal is really small. I’m much less sure it’s scientifically justified to say so as I don’t know much about the state of research there.
I maybe kind of missed the “important” word there. Still...
Scientific debates are never about whether two groups are “exactly equal”. The notion that the question is about whether something is “exactly equal” ignores the core about what the debate is about.
Important is indeed an important word in the sentence.
When trying to understand writing, don’t go for the strawman. Try to understand what could be meant. What differences in beliefs in the question about? It’s not a hard question if you look at it with genuine interest of understanding it.
I try to, but here I could be overcompensating from sometimes “going too deep” with questions like that. If the question was “Do you believe interpopulational genetic differences in mental abilities or character traits are large enough to be a factor in policy making”, I’d answer “No” and maybe even “Hell no, for a multinational population”. But that seems like a very different question.
I don’t think “ignoring the context” is well described as going deep. Part of critical reading is to think about why someone writes what they write instead just trying to focus on the literal meaning of words. It’s rather only engaging with the surface.
It’s ignoring the context that can be described as not going deep enough. My other usual algorithm “if the question seems easy, look for a deeper meaning” is not without its faults either. Btw, what the context of a single question that asks me to describe my opinion of something as I understand the term actually is?
Alright, I got it, I fail critical reading forever. Yet. Growth mindset. What was the real meaning?
People in our society differ in how they think about genetic differences. There are people who think that race matters a great deal and other you think it doesn’t matter. It’s useful to have a metric that distinguishes those people.
If you have that metric you can ask interesting questions such as whether people who are well calibrated are more likely to score high on that metric. It’s interesting whether the metric changes from year to year.
That means the question tries to point at a property that people disagree about. In this case it’s whether genetic differences are important. The question doesn’t define “important” but there are various right wing people such as neoreocons and red-pill-folks who identify with the term “human biodiversity”. The question doesn’t try to ask for a specific well-defined belief but points to that cluster of beliefs. It’s the same way that the feminism question doesn’t point to a well-defined belief. You don’t need a well-defined belief to get valuable information from a poll.
The question made it into the the survey because I complained about the usage of tribal labels such as liberal/conversative where people have to pick one choice as a way to measure political beliefs. I argued that focusing on agreement on issues is more meaningful and provides better data.
What about people who think that neither of these positions is defensible? Well, I suppose you wouldn’t go wrong by calling them metacontrarians.
That why you don’t ask for a “yes”/”no” answer.
Thank you for the explaination.
Sorry, I’m still not getting it. Doesn’t matter.
There is the unstated but implied “differences which are significant and have important consequences in real life”.
Sure, I would still bet they’re going to be statistically significant if we get millions of people into the dataset. They may also have some important consequences in real life (a higher resistance to a specific disease may be important for a person with some usually small probability. A population of million that is more resistant to the disease than it could be is about million times that important). It just shouldn’t influence policies much. Though it can make a difference in healthcare… well, no. It actually can influence some policies and economic results for countries with different populations. Lactose tolerance may have effects on agriculture and the export structure, especially long term. The question singles out intelligence and personality traits for no apparent reasons but controversy, being hard to measure and being on the spiritual side of dualism. And probably being more involved in our ideas of human worthiness than height is.
I am not sure what are you arguing. The fact that there are important genetic differences between populations at the medical level is uncontroversial. The controversial issue is whether these differences, as some people put it, “stop at the neck”.
Nope, there are apparent reasons. Intelligence of the populations is massively, hugely important, much more so than lactose intolerance or propensity for exotic diseases. See e.g. this or this.
Not really arguing anything. I’m asking if there is a rational non-meta reason to believe they do “stop at the neck” even if we throw away all the IQ/nations data.
Thanks for the reason I’ve missed. Are personal traits as important?
Of course there are. The standard argument is that the history of human evolution suggests that increased intelligence and favorable personality traits were strongly selected for, and traits which are strongly selected tend to reach fixation rather quickly.
But then the difference in intelligence would be almost completely shared + nonshared environment. And twin studies suggest it’s very inheritable. It also seems to be a polygenic trait, so there can be quite a lot of new mutations there that haven’t yet reached fixation even if it’s strongly selected for.
Not to my knowledge.
That is a more controversial subject. They are clearly less important than intelligence, but things like time preference (what kind of trade-offs do you make between a smaller reward now and a bigger reward later) or, say, propensity for violence got to be at least somewhat important.
I don’t know too much about HBD, but I would guess that the most important trait for them is intelligence. And maybe aggressivity, impulse control, ability to cooperate with non-relatives, and this kind of necessary-for-civilization things. (You can ignore other traits, such as eye color or lactose tolerance, they don’t make a big difference in modern society. So you’ll buy a different box of milk, big deal.)
Mathematically speaking, if you could measure something to million decimal places, it is very unlikely that the averages for different populations would be exactly the same. But in real life, a difference of 1 IQ point does not make a huge difference. So the question is whether the differences are large enough to matter in real life.
Humanity split from our common origin about 10000 years ago. It seems like enough time to make significant changes; for example, mere 1 IQ point per century could accumulate to a difference of dozens of IQ points below distant populations. On the other hand, humans were already shaped by evolution millenia before they split, so maybe most possibilities of cheaply gaining yet another IQ point were already exhausted before we split. I don’t feel certain enough to make a hypothesis either way.
So we should solve this question empirically, and then we get into problems—the old research was unreliable, and the new one is not done for political reasons. So I still feel like the answer could go either way.
This question is solved empirically. If you look at the data it’s really obvious. There is NO serious research which claims that all populations have essentially the same IQ.
You’re off by an order of magnitude or so.
Oops, indeed.
“citation needed”
Here is a quick-n-easy example, or if you want details they are here.
Here are a couple of books
And here is a long, detailed post with a lot of numbers, graphs, and references.
Am I reading the linked example correctly, that Asian-Americans’ IQ keeps growing during the last decade, and everyone else’s IQ in USA keeps dropping?
I mean, if you assume that the differences is SAT scores between races reflect their differences in IQ, it seems reasonable to assume that the differences in SAT scores between now and ten years ago reflect the differences in IQ between now and ten years ago. (Either that, or SAT also reflects something else beyond IQ.)
Several things here.
First, look at the magnitudes. The difference between Asians and blacks is about 380 points in 2015. Compared to that number the declines (-6 to −28) are very minor.
Second, while I don’t have data at hand, I strongly suspect that the Asian population of SAT takers changed during the last decade. In particular, the upper class of China got wealthy enough and “international” enough to start sending their kids to US universities (which usually involves taking the SAT) and that’s besides increased immigration from China in general.
Third, SAT is a proxy for IQ and it’s not a stable test. It’s being tweaked and adjusted constantly. Among other things, SAT is normalized so that the score of 500 corresponds to about the 50th percentile of test-takers. If you have a influx of smarter-than-average kids, they will not only push their subgroup scores up, they will also push everyone else’s scores down.
The SAT scores from different years are somewhat comparable (because they are normalized), but not fully comparable because the tests from these different years are literally different. That’s not a problem for comparing the performance of subgroups in any given year, though.