posted on June 04, 2018 03:42 AM by
u/onomatodoxast
24
u/pherq18 pointsat 1528094974.000000
This is entertainingly accurate to the original meaning of
“meritocracy”, but one suspects that they aren’t aware that the person
who coined it was attacking it.
One might read the paper, wherein one might find the words:
> The word meritocracy was coined by Michael Young, whose book, *The Rise of the Meritocracy*, was meant as a cautionary tale about the dangers of meritocracy.
I'll cop to writing that prior to reading anything but the abstract (as a non-paywalled version hadn't been posted), but oh well. It's not my field, so it's not really for me to criticise it (which makes having the top comment slightly embarrassing...) but the notion that genetics determining outcomes indicates that things are meritocratic seems odd to me.
Naive mathematician that I am, I would have guessed that the primary
effect you would find is the following:
Estonia has quite separate ethnic groups: “Ethnic Estonians” and
“ethnic Russians” (who were settled there in the Stalin era). I would
expect that any genetic study will instantly pick this separation as the
leading eigenvalue.
Now, what changed in differential SES / educational attainment / etc
after the end of the soviet union?
Yes, you guessed it. In the soviet union, ethnic russians were
privileged (filthy reactionary scum that the locals were); post
soviet-union, ethnic Estonians were privileged. Just basic stuff, like
official language, etc (I presume that it is an educational advantage to
grow up as a native speaker of the government language).
Now, how do the authors discuss / correct for this potential bias (or
argue that it does not exist/matter)?
You guessed it, they don’t even mention it (or I failed at reading
comprehension). wtflol?
They also don't seem to account for the potential for changing demographics, different distances in the GWAS reference panel and the PGS panels, or a general increase in development that occurred during Soviet-era that could increase PGS in younger individuals.
Well it's a new Nature family journal and it's from some big names so that probably helped. I don't think the journal is particularly specialized in genetics so it could have gotten reviewers not as familiar with some aspects and cautions of PGS
One factor in the shifting early 90s landscape was that the ruble savings were *completely* wiped out by inflation. You could buy nearly anything but you needed to have a lot of foreign currency, which mostly limited it to organized crime or repatriated cash from descendants of WW2 emigration.
> Estonia has quite separate ethnic groups: "Ethnic Estonians" and "ethnic Russians" (who were settled there in the Stalin era). I would expect that any genetic study will instantly pick this separation as the leading eigenvalue.
Only if you assume there are genetic differences between Estonian and Russian populations that affect educational attainment and occupational status. Why do you think this assumption is warranted?
> In the soviet union, ethnic russians were privileged (filthy reactionary scum that the locals were); post soviet-union, ethnic Estonians were privileged.
No, in Soviet times the privilege ran along party lines, not ethnic lines.
> I presume that it is an educational advantage to grow up as a native speaker of the government language.
No, the educational system is bilingual. Schools are fully Estonian or fully Russian, and universities have Estonian groups and Russian groups. This is slowly transitioning to a more Estonian-based curriculum, but it does not affect the study, as age 25 or younger were excluded.
> You guessed it, they don't even mention it (or I failed at reading comprehension). wtflol?
The source of the data is the [Estonian Genome Center databank](https://www.geenivaramu.ee/en/access-biobank), which consists of 83% Estonian, 14% Russian and 3% other ethnicities.
It's fairly well known that the Russian speaking minority in Estonia is treated in a pretty hostile way by the majority, and even more so given tensions with Russia these days. This is an important reason why the two ethnic groups remain so separate there, which is much less true in Lithuania, for example. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/verges/article/viewFile/11634/3698
> It's fairly well known that the Russian speaking minority in Estonia is treated in a pretty hostile way by the majority
Ah. "It is known".
That article is very bad, and very much resembling Kremlin talking points. *"Estonia and Latvia are more similar in their harsh assimilation and blatant means of expulsion."* - the hell? It simultaneously accuses Estonia of not assimilating Russians fast enough, and of trying to assimilate them too much.
The reason for Lithuania's greater integration is very simple - Lithuania has about 5% Russians, whereas Estonia and Latvia have about 25%. Bigger minority groups always assimilate less.
Russians speaking more Lithuanian in Lithuania than Estonian in Estonia was not prejudice from Estonians, but from Russians. Of course they learnt Lithuanian - the country was overwhelmingly Lithuanian. In Estonia they did not have to, they had all-Russian communities, and so they did not.
Edit: downvoted to -2.. dear lord. What exactly is so unworthy here?
That article shows nothing like *"Russian speaking minority in Estonia is treated in a pretty hostile way by the majority, and even more so given tensions with Russia these days"*. Quite on the contrary, actually - did you even read it?
"The field of citizenship is probably the most critical topic as well as the one where the unequal position of significant minority groups is the most obvious and visible... Growing enmities against the minority are increasing due to demographic changes and an ageing population... The labour market is... until today one of the main areas of social discrimination, repulsion and disparity... The Estonian labour market is competitive and the situation very difficult for members of the Russian-speaking minority, regardless of citizenship status. They earn less, are often excluded from public offices and have a significant higher risk of facing rejection by potential employers than other citizens. The employment rate among Estonians is higher than among non-Estonians: in 2013, 6.8 % of Estonians were unemployed, whereas among ethnic non-Estonians this rate was 12.4 %... Feelings of discrimination that therefore occur lead to low level interethnic contact, isolation and open animosity towards the majority. Events like the 2007 riot over the relocation of a Soviet-era war statue in Tallinn are good examples for societal tensions that may erupt at any time..."
The problem here is that all those sentences talking about growing enmities and discrimination are unsourced. Everything in the article is unsourced.
And other than the few remarks, most of the article paints a completely different picture than *"Russian speaking minority in Estonia is treated in a pretty hostile way by the majority"*.
Living in Estonia, among Estonians and Russians, I don't see it. Working with people, Estonians and Russians, I don't see it. Talking to people, Estonians and Russians, I don't see it. Reading the news, I don't see it. Looking at statistics, I don't see it.
Where do you see it?
> Only if you assume there are genetic differences between Estonian and Russian populations that affect educational attainment and occupational status. Why do you think this assumption is warranted?
It actually doesn't need to affect the trait, it has to affect how the populations fit a model based on a UK reference population. Different population substructure will behave differently in the model.
>Only if you assume there are genetic differences between Estonian and Russian populations that affect educational attainment and occupational status. Why do you think this assumption is warranted?
Others said this already, but I'll explain in detail:
Fact of the world: If you look at genomes, you can see ancestry, even for individuals. You can definitely separate groups of differing genetic ancestry.
Genetic ancestry is obviously strongly correlated to russian-speaking vs estonian speaking.
Now there is a very plausible correlation between language and educational attainment that plausibly changed after the end of the soviet union.
This is plausibly a giant confounder for this kind of study in Estonia. If you have a plausible confounder in your study, then the onus is on the authors to discuss it, possibly correct for it, argue that it is plausible but not real, or mention it as a caveat of their study. The linked paper does nothing of this sort.
> Now there is a very plausible correlation between language and educational attainment that plausibly changed after the end of the soviet union.
No, there isn't - because Russian people *continued to study in Russian*, in both schools and universities. I work in a university, and in our institute most lecturers are actually Russian, many students are Russian, and they study in Russian.
Ethnicity seems to have no relevance in this context at all, and that is why the study did not focus on it. Attempting to drag it in as some sort of a counter is just without basis - especially since Russians made up a whopping 14% of the people analyzed.
This thread makes me feel feel like I'm taking crazy pills. My comments get downvoted to a fucking -5, unlike people whose knowledge of the matter is obviously based on their first googling.
>No, there isn't - because Russian people continued to study in Russian, in both schools and universities. I work in a university, and in our institute most lecturers are actually Russian, many students are Russian, and they study in Russian.
I believe you that you are more knowledgeable about the detailed state of affairs in Estonia.
However, you appear to misunderstand what a "plausible confounder" is:
When you have somewhat separate ethnic groups, then you must assume that every study is by-default confounded by this split. It is now the job of the researcher to carefully design his study to take this into account and/or make the arguments you are making now.
The bar for "possible confounder is plausible enough to merit explicit discussion" is really low. Are you saying that the language-split is not meeting this bar? That is: The hypothesis is that the Russian-speaking minority has suffered/profited in a (statistically significant, i.e. above noise-floor for N=12.000) different way from the end of the soviet union than the Estonian-speaking majority. Are you claiming that this is so implausible that the authors don't even need to look at the data? Or are you claiming that this has been refuted by data, and the sneeree-article just failed to cite the data that refuses this hypothesis? Or are you claiming that the sneeree-article does correctly cite data refuting this semi-plausible hypothesis and I failed at reading comprehension?
I am claiming that dismissing the study due to a lack of focus on ethnic lines, is a red herring in this context, because firstly Estonians and Russians are in rather similar situations for the purpose of the study, and mostly because Russians make up 14% of the sample population.
> No, in Soviet times the privilege ran along party lines, not ethnic lines.
Ethnic privilege absolutely existed in the Soviet Union, particularly after the end of WW2.
They don't really do the proper diligence to support this hypothesis. See this [tweet](https://twitter.com/cecilejanssens/status/1003435108597227521) for example. They don't seem to have paid near enough attention to population structure/stratification.
That tweet does not explain much anything, but I am not a geneticist, so I am not qualified to assay the study.
My point is that the study has no connection to the rationalist sphere, and so it seems out of place here. Unless people think that any sort of research into genetic correlations immediately falls under HBD.
Basically what their data says is that the post-soviet sample seem to fit the UK reference population better than pre-soviet. There's lots of reasons for that and the authors don't do a great job rooting out competing hypotheses.
This feels rationalism related to me because it's some lazy meritocracy and over interpreting genetics data.
It seems an error of reasoning anyway. It's correct to say that the more 'fair' everything else is, the more the only remaining differences would be driven by genetic inheritance. It does not follow from that that the more genetic markers correlate with social status or 'success', the more fair the society is. This is something I've noticed you see in (dubious) genetics and intel research all the time.
This is entertainingly accurate to the original meaning of “meritocracy”, but one suspects that they aren’t aware that the person who coined it was attacking it.
Naive mathematician that I am, I would have guessed that the primary effect you would find is the following:
Estonia has quite separate ethnic groups: “Ethnic Estonians” and “ethnic Russians” (who were settled there in the Stalin era). I would expect that any genetic study will instantly pick this separation as the leading eigenvalue.
Now, what changed in differential SES / educational attainment / etc after the end of the soviet union?
Yes, you guessed it. In the soviet union, ethnic russians were privileged (filthy reactionary scum that the locals were); post soviet-union, ethnic Estonians were privileged. Just basic stuff, like official language, etc (I presume that it is an educational advantage to grow up as a native speaker of the government language).
Now, how do the authors discuss / correct for this potential bias (or argue that it does not exist/matter)?
You guessed it, they don’t even mention it (or I failed at reading comprehension). wtflol?
Paywall.