Oh boy, these HBD sympathisers really love to smuggle stuff in under
“non-zero”. It’s an easy 2 step process:
Step 1: Attempt to prove that genetic correlations are unlikely to be
literally exactly zero.
step 2: now that you’ve proven they’re “non-zero”, blindly assert (or
heavily imply) that the actual value is huge enough to explain away all
racial disparities as genetic!
Nevermind that non-zero could mean 0.0000001 or
0.000000000000000000000000001, and could go in either direction!
EXACTLY THIS.
I've actually done and published human psychiatric genetics research (not any more, wound up career-changing into tech from academia) and, frankly, as most experts would agree, you can find a genetic correlation at some level for almost any trait.^* And, because race is a social construct that correlates fairly well with ancestry, and ancestry changes base allele distributions, there's certainly at least some small relation between race and every single psychiatric trait simply stochastically.
And these dumbshit assholes take this tiny core of truth and twist it into weird racist bullshit. If they really were interested in "the science", why not do this poll for the racial correlates of [liking white wine](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4795214/), or [hypersomnia](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=23646285), or [drinking alcohol](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=21372407),^** or [erectile dysfunction after radiotherapy](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=20932654), or [habitual coffee drinking](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=27561104). But they aren't, because these aren't edgy enough.
Fucking LARPers.
(Sorry for the wall of text, this rationalist motte-and-bailey argument is something that deeply annoys me.)
^* And it's probably a fairly strong relationship- most psychometric traits seem to be about 50% genetic, as per the best tools we have.
^** Sidenote- unlike intelligence, we do actually know a significant ancestry effect in alcoholism. A mutation in the gene ALDH2 found primarily in people of east Asian ancestry, which is responsible for ethanol metabolism, causes "Asian blush" and is a significant protective factor against alcoholism.
What is the chance that, when we’ve finally seen enough of Robin
Hanson’s twitter feed, we will find that there is actually zero
correlation between being Robin Hanson and a racist shithead?
As someone who had to take one of those long-ass IQ tests, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s literally true.
The logistics of gathering a statistically significant subset of the population to take the WAIS 5 supervised by someone with the appropriate clinical background would be an expensive nightmare.
It is completely reasonable to believe this unless they can supply a corpus proving the above happened in a way that the data could not have been doctored. Even with that, data dredging with an agenda is pretty common.
As n -> infinity, the probability of rejecting such a null hypothesis is one. He just earned a few million more years of acausal robot torture.
Ah, that feeling when you take stats and fail to grasp the idea of “significance”.
Oh boy, these HBD sympathisers really love to smuggle stuff in under “non-zero”. It’s an easy 2 step process:
Step 1: Attempt to prove that genetic correlations are unlikely to be literally exactly zero.
step 2: now that you’ve proven they’re “non-zero”, blindly assert (or heavily imply) that the actual value is huge enough to explain away all racial disparities as genetic!
Nevermind that non-zero could mean 0.0000001 or 0.000000000000000000000000001, and could go in either direction!
What is the chance that, when we’ve finally seen enough of Robin Hanson’s twitter feed, we will find that there is actually zero correlation between being Robin Hanson and a racist shithead?
Zero chance that there’s no genetic correlation between Robin Hanson and reptilians.
To paraphrase another Robin Hanson tweet: This is why we shouldn’t decide genetics by popular vote.
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Define ‘genetic correlation’, and define ‘race’.