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if you’re a geneticist looking for something that no one has been able to define and measure *jeff foxworthy voice* then you might be a nazi
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Sep 8, 2021 17:15
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Zeroisanumber posted:We honestly don't understand how genes impact traits like intelligence. We don't even understand the structure and workings of the brain well enough to explain why one person is smarter than another. It's also overly deterministic to say that genes explain accomplishment and behavior and smacks of an obsession with genetic hierarchy that's problematic at best. separating nature from nurture wrt intelligence is basically impossible because having smart parents is very strongly correlated with having an upbringing that encourages intelligence, and you can't exactly do a double-blind experiment on this subject
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Sep 8, 2021 17:29
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crepeface posted:can we get a mod to change the title to media fails or something
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Sep 8, 2021 17:44
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vyelkin posted:separating nature from nurture wrt intelligence is basically impossible because having smart parents is very strongly correlated with having an upbringing that encourages intelligence, and you can't exactly do a double-blind experiment on this subject Well. Twin studies.
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Sep 8, 2021 18:40
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I think it's weird how there's this commonsense that a genetic predisposition to being smarter or stupider would entail deserving better or worse life outcomes, or more or less political power. Like if IQ really were a single accurate measure of true and innate intelligence, an IQ of 105 would entitle someone to $20 000 a year more than someone with an IQ of 95. Like obviously nobody here agrees with that, but it still seems natural enough that we've just accepted it as one of the contours of the topic.
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Sep 8, 2021 18:57
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hardin is right. if the left refuses to engage with human genetics and cedes all research on it to the right-wing we will lose before there is even a fight. the fact that there is genetic difference between people is not an argument for meritocracy but rather an argument against it - if educational attainment and accumulation of wealth correlate with broad genetic profiles (not along racial lines btw - race is an arbitrary social construct that has very little to do with genetic variance) then it is incumbent upon us to build a society where these things don't affect your quality of life. genetic variance is a topic that supports leftist aims but is twisted by fash to be all about race and meritocracy instead she doesn't purport to measure "intelligence" btw. read the whole article, this is a nuanced subject that a headline is useless for understanding. she is measuring outcomes - who goes to college, who becomes wealthy without inherited wealth, who gets divorced, etc. etc. lots of different stuff. the traits that allow you to succeed in a capitalist society are not "intelligence", they are an array of personality traits and talents, some of which are objectively positive (finding math and reading easy) and others which are negative (being consistently selfish and stubborn, a lack of empathy, willingness to deceive, etc.). they also aren't personally predictive - that is to say, you can have a genome that appears to correlate with bad outcomes and come out of it very successful, which might indicate a person who somehow becomes rich and successful while not being a huge rear end in a top hat in the process, or a person who doesn't have much natural aptitude at key academic skills but invests a lot of time into developing them and has a good support network for doing so. i mean look. trump is like the ultimate argument for environment not being the only determining factor in the development of your mind. he received everything you would need to cultivate intellectual curiosity and ability through his wealthy background, and came out the other end a huge moron rear end in a top hat. that doesn't mean we should structure society to punish him or anything, but that rewarding "merit" with quality of life is fundamentally unjust because some of that "merit" is pure luck. these are all bits of reasoning that are quite accepted in leftist thought if you are speaking of abstract personal qualities instead of genes as such Jazerus has issued a correction as of 19:34 on Sep 8, 2021 |
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Sep 8, 2021 19:15
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That is nonsense. There simply isn't enough information about genes and gene interaction to pin down how genetic intelligence is. The basics of the issue is: everybody recognizes that different measures of cognitive ability tend to be highly correlated between parents and children. There is a vast, specific literature that documents how a lot of that is related to socialization, "concerted cultivation," cultural capital, etc. Those are things that are verifiable and widely studied. At the same time, there remains differences that are not yet explained by these social factors. That can be because of a number of things. These things can range from "the data misses an important dimension of socialization" to "these are hard coded genetic differences". But the amount that is not yet explained by social factors has been declining over time. On the flipside, there has been no identified intelligence gene. So this whole thing about genetic and cognitive ability isn't because someone has identified the intelligence gene and the left has chosen to ignore that research. The whole thing is that people on the right want to explain what remains of the unexplained variation in measures of intelligence "biological" and be done with it, claiming that "sure, in the past this unexplained variance decreased when we accounted for more social factors, but NOW we've exhausted those and right now what remains must be biological." It's a perversion of science. It would make about as much sense to say that this remaining unexplained variance is caused by the will of god as anything. Now, I am not using this to deny that a portion of cognitive ability is genetic. It might very well be that it is a factor, even the biggest factor. But the current attempts to document that genetic component have been mostly by pointing to unexplained variation and claiming that it must be genetic, rather than actually finding genes. Also, most of the Charles Murray type research tends to ignore that over the course of the 20th century, the educational achievement has been eliminated for gender, is declining for racial and ethnic minorities, but remains the same for social class. And if anything, on the neuro side all the research on brain plasticity would seem to indicate that believing that there is some set aspect of the brain that is there from birth and uninfluenced by the environment is wrong. Finally, people love to point to how good a predictor of college performance the SATs are. Interestingly, they tend to completely ignore that GRE scores have been found to be very poor predictors of graduate school performance... joepinetree has issued a correction as of 19:43 on Sep 8, 2021 |
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Sep 8, 2021 19:40
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this is not about intelligence it is about life outcomes in a specific, capitalist society she does not purport to measure intelligence!!! any geneticist or neuroscientist that isn't a chud would agree with you that we don't understand "intelligence" well enough to even say that it exists as a single quantity, and that evidence in fact points to it not existing as a single quantity. please respond to my post as i actually wrote it. i do have an education in this subject myself although i didn't end up going into science since the job market and overall work culture is, uh, *tugs collar* bad. hardin is saying that our society is set up wrong, because it rewards and punishes based on genetic luck (luck that has much more to do with predispositions toward things that capitalism rewards, which intelligence is frankly only a minor factor in) instead of creating a beneficial environment for all of us to develop within regardless of whether you won the lottery (literally or figuratively). this is a fundamentally leftist, even communist, premise. and her research has nothing to do with murray-style race science, it is not premised on the idea that "race" exists as anything but a social construct that partially determines how your environment impacts you. she is looking at variation between people not demographic groups i'm sorry i don't mean to be harsh but willful misreading on subjects like this is not acceptable for a leftist imo. trying to score points as some posters here did by labeling the whole enterprise of understanding how our bodies influence our minds as an endeavor for the right-wing is stupid, we must understand the science so that we can speak authoritatively against those trying to use it for sick racialized caste system purposes Jazerus has issued a correction as of 20:06 on Sep 8, 2021 |
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Sep 8, 2021 19:45
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Sep 8, 2021 20:07
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Every single thing I said also applies to life outcomes. It's nothing more than political opinion disguised as scientism. It's this popular but wrongheaded idea that social sciences are soft and therefore inherently subaltern to hard sciences. Rather than demonstrate the genetic-life outcome or whatever you want to do link, it assumes that the variation that is unexplained by currently modeled social factors must be genetic, for no other reason than "genes" being the new "divine right of kings" of legitimizing social stratification. Genetics is still trying to identify all the different combinations that affect height, and most identified ones have small impacts that we are still unclear on how they interact with each other, but we're somehow supposed to jump straight into the deep end of geneticism when it comes to the far more complex, social and interactive idea of "life outcomes." Yes, genetics very likely play a role in a number of different outcomes and measures. But we don't know, have no reliable way of estimating it now, and have no actual model of the mechanism, which makes this completely irrelevant from a public policy or political perspective. What we have is people pushing the idea that anything that is not currently explained by social science must be genetic. Even as the amount that is not currently explained by social science gets smaller and smaller over time. It's "sure, there's all these gaps closing and others emerging as society changes, but that is all in the past, the unexplained variation that remains RIGHT NOW is all genes." joepinetree has issued a correction as of 20:12 on Sep 8, 2021 |
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Sep 8, 2021 20:07
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I don’t think we need to brake out the craniometers before we can build an equitable society.
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Sep 8, 2021 20:15
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joepinetree posted:Every single thing I said also applies to life outcomes. i generally agree that this is exactly how people seeking to explain variation as genetic have operated for many decades, yes. an assumption that our current models of social factors are complete and therefore variation outside of those social factors must be genetic. but that is manifestly not how modern polygenic studies of the type that hardin is doing work! they identify specific genes and how they correlate with whatever outcome you are measuring, individually and as a group. it is not simply looking at life outcomes and saying that all remaining variation is genetic, it is basically looking at this subject in a serious and scientific way for the first time ever because almost all of the previous efforts have been exactly what you describe - bunk. things are changing very rapidly in genetics as our tools have become so much more powerful that people barely even know where to start using them. i would have agreed with your post wholeheartedly ten years ago, now? i think it's making uncharitable assumptions mostly because it's not completely current with the state of the field. almost nobody is completely current with the state of the field so i understand. YOLOsubmarine posted:I don’t think we need to brake out the craniometers before we can build an equitable society. no, we don't. but like i said, genetic variance is simply another part of the puzzle that justifies why society should be equitable to people who are somewhat dubious about the idea, who believe that people should succeed or fail based on their merits. people are generally much less likely to support meritocracy if they believe that the "merit" in question is not actually under the control of the people who are succeeding or failing. isn't that why we're all leftists, generally? we believe that societal circumstances put people in place to succeed or fail and therefore determining someone's quality of life and rights based on their "success" is unjust. this is simply an extension of that principle to also include the inequalities determined by nature rather than society, or those determined by a mixture of both. Jazerus has issued a correction as of 20:25 on Sep 8, 2021 |
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Sep 8, 2021 20:20
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Jazerus posted:i generally agree that this is exactly how people seeking to explain variation as genetic have operated for many decades, yes. an assumption that our current models of social factors are complete and therefore variation outside of those social factors must be genetic. but that is manifestly not how modern polygenic studies of the type that hardin is doing work! they identify specific genes and how they correlate with whatever outcome you are measuring, individually and as a group. it is not simply looking at life outcomes and saying that all remaining variation is genetic, it is basically looking at this subject in a serious and scientific way for the first time ever because almost all of the previous efforts have been exactly what you describe - bunk. Picked her 2 2021 articles. Both were in areas where most people have long recognized the genetic factors related to it (addiction and alcoholism), both found that it explained some part of the variation that at most comparable to other identified social factors. So at best this is a massive bait and switch argument that you are engaging in here. Very few people ignore or claim that things like addiction or substance abuse have a significant inheritable component. There is no resistance to research of that type, and no one dismisses it like you are suggesting. The fact that Harden is a tenured professor with almost 8000 citations pretty much indicates that. Also, I glanced at her one article that seems to be about intelligence and she does exactly what I described above, of treating the remainder of social models and assuming that it must be genetic. Edit: Also, the whole genetic/neuroscience turn in psychology is a great example of the feedback loop of politics and science. Funding for social sciences has been gutted by years of sequestration and bipartisan austerity, where republicans complain that social science is communism. But funding for medical stuff isn't especially because lobbying is much stronger on that side. So every psych department is trying to get NIH grants and hire people who can get NIH grants. Because if you are someone working in a well established area of psychology that has been found to explain most of the variation in outcomes in a particular aspect of mental health, you are competing with a ton of other people for a diminishing pool of money. But if you are trying to get 100,000 genetic tests to find something that explains 10% of observed variation in something, not only will you get 6 digit NIH grants, but also be profiled as the person bringing "real science" to psychology. joepinetree has issued a correction as of 20:48 on Sep 8, 2021 |
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Sep 8, 2021 20:37
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hmmmm ok. i'll take your word for it because you're a good poster that i trust and i don't have academic access anymore, so i'll refrain from defending her specifically. i do think an approach that doesn't simply assume all unexplained variance is genetic but rather seeks specific causation is worthwhile but maybe she's not the person to bear the standard here. i'm also not devaluing the social sciences, which you seem to be implying is inherent to my argument. i have never been a partisan in the hard vs soft science debate because both are intrinsically valuable and valid ways of seeking knowledge about the world. of course genetic factors are going to only explain part of the variance in something like alcoholism while other parts of the variance are socially/environmentally mediated; i've defended the validity of psych in conversations with hard science partisans in the same way i'm defending the validity of genetics with you, although i don't think we really disagree very much here. i'm not suggesting that scientists are dismissing her. i'm saying that the broader, non-scientist left needs to not have a kneejerk reaction to the topic which ultimately cedes ground to the right-wing Jazerus has issued a correction as of 20:50 on Sep 8, 2021 |
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Sep 8, 2021 20:46
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I don't think the non-scientific left has a knee-jerk reaction to the idea that there are genetic components to addiction and alcoholism. That is the bait and switch of that article. Takes someone successfully using genes to predict a very specific type of outcome that most people would recognize has a genetic component and then extrapolating that therefore the "left" is wrong to dismiss the current geneticism of the right. The non-scientific left has a correct reaction to attempts to argue that things like intelligence are genetic. There are essentially 4 branches of research here. Social science, which has been able to explain, broadly, a significant but not total part of variation in measures of intelligence through social factors. Some psychology, that does like twin studies and assumes that the correlations there must be genetic, with little to no controlling for social factors and sample selection issues. Genetic research, which hasn't been able at all to identified genes that determine intelligence. And pseudo race science that claims that any gaps between self identified groups must be genetic. Because scientism places natural sciences as somehow more real than social sciences, the right acts as if the branch with the best results is actually the worst because it hasn't been completely able to map out all variation.
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Sep 8, 2021 20:59
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Hand Knit posted:I think it's weird how there's this commonsense that a genetic predisposition to being smarter or stupider would entail deserving better or worse life outcomes, or more or less political power. Like if IQ really were a single accurate measure of true and innate intelligence, an IQ of 105 would entitle someone to $20 000 a year more than someone with an IQ of 95. Its almost like IQ is a justification for ones superior position in a hierarchy 
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Sep 8, 2021 22:22
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"scientism?"
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Sep 8, 2021 22:36
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Bootlicks and class traitors to the wall!
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Sep 8, 2021 22:51
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the ethics of being a petty, jealous snitch
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Sep 8, 2021 22:57
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NYT really agitating people return to slave in the plague dens https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1435685381626793984
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Sep 8, 2021 22:59
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Euphoriaphone posted:NYT really agitating people return to slave in the plague dens Maybe they're referring to the CEOs and other higher ups who never interact with the regular employees of companies (lol)
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Sep 8, 2021 23:17
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Euphoriaphone posted:NYT really agitating people return to slave in the plague dens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l-gn8tUfgw
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Sep 9, 2021 01:31
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Euphoriaphone posted:NYT really agitating people return to slave in the plague dens does that guy work in andross's lair or something
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Sep 9, 2021 01:32
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Jazerus posted:no, we don't. but like i said, genetic variance is simply another part of the puzzle that justifies why society should be equitable to people who are somewhat dubious about the idea, who believe that people should succeed or fail based on their merits. people are generally much less likely to support meritocracy if they believe that the "merit" in question is not actually under the control of the people who are succeeding or failing. isn't that why we're all leftists, generally? we believe that societal circumstances put people in place to succeed or fail and therefore determining someone's quality of life and rights based on their "success" is unjust. this is simply an extension of that principle to also include the inequalities determined by nature rather than society, or those determined by a mixture of both. I don’t think people are going to give up on meritocracy as a concept if you show them a copy of the Bell Curve. We’ve got ample evidence of what race science leads to and it’s at worst eugenics and genocide and at best insulting paternalism. Nobody has ever become a communist because they became convinced that black people are too stupid to compete in the labor market and need to be taken care of by the state. The fundamental question is whether your public policies would change at all if you learned that as a population SE Asians are just genetically better at math than caucasians? That they’ve just got a higher proportion of the good math genes. What policy would you implement based on that information that you would not have done otherwise? YOLOsubmarine has issued a correction as of 05:48 on Sep 9, 2021 |
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Sep 9, 2021 03:41
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YOLOsubmarine posted:I don’t think people are going to give up on meritocracy as a concept if you show them a copy of the Bell Curve. We’ve got ample evidence of what race science leads to and it’s at worst eugenics and genocide and at best insulting paternalism. Nobody has ever become a communist because they became convinced that black people are too stupid to compete in the labor market and need to be taken care of by the state.
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Sep 9, 2021 05:39
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YOLOsubmarine posted:I don’t think people are going to give up on meritocracy as a concept if you show them a copy of the Bell Curve. We’ve got ample evidence of what race science leads to and it’s at worst eugenics and genocide and at best insulting paternalism. Nobody has ever become a communist because they became convinced that black people are too stupid to compete in the labor market and need to be taken care of by the state. this is the crucial question that the 'hereditarian left' just completely fail to address btw. the act of creating a community is the people organizing, genes dont decide if were equal, we ourselves do. even rawls, a liberal, acknowledged that genetic advantages are 'unearned' in his theory of justice and essentially said that more innately gifted people should bear a greater share of the tax burden, but it all comes down to: you have to take care of everybody, no matter how well they were born, applying to both genetic and property factors. so what is the hereditarian left adding to the debate? my glib answer would be 'material for racists to base their genetic caste worldview on'
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Sep 9, 2021 06:56
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https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1435623767527632896?s=19
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Sep 9, 2021 08:38
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Wraith of J.O.I. posted:lol drat judith butler is so powerful, the terfs just can’t handle them Gender Now! Tomorrow would be too late.
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Sep 9, 2021 08:43
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Euphoriaphone posted:NYT really agitating people return to slave in the plague dens my coworker’s dad died this week and it was a bummer. I ha w other coworkers who bring their cats out on zoom to entertain me. I’m way closer to the people I only met once IRL than I’ve been at any other job. maybe the New York Times is filled with boring people.
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Sep 9, 2021 08:48
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yeah it was definitely the truthers, it certainly wasn't us in the media promoting bush's illegal wars based on lies that fueled the war on reality, no siree
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Sep 9, 2021 09:59
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"Iraq did 9/11, and they're linked to Al-Qaeda" was a conspiracy theory hell, Al-Qaeda doing 9/11 was never sufficiently proven either
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Sep 9, 2021 10:05
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Communist Thoughts posted:"scientism?" It's an unwarranted application of science in situations considered not amenable to application of the scientific method or similar scientific standards. Sometimes means fetishizing "hard" science while disparaging "soft" science. Think of liberals saying they loving love science but using that flawed CDC study to say 3ft social distancing is ok for an excuse to open schools back up.
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Sep 9, 2021 10:59
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Yadoppsi posted:It's an unwarranted application of science in situations considered not amenable to application of the scientific method or similar scientific standards. Sometimes means fetishizing "hard" science while disparaging "soft" science. Liberals with science like that are much like conservatives with religion.
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Sep 9, 2021 12:16
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I think pandemic magement is probably a situation amenable to the application of science. The issue there is the CDC is full of poo poo. That's just fetishisation of science by people who don't understand it E mind you I have run into what could probably be called "scientism" at work where environmental scientists are explaining how their graphs prove their flood defenses are excellent while the public point out their house is underwater. Though I'd file that under PMC data driven bullshit rather than putting science where it doesn't belong I'm bias though since I did do a stemlord degree I'm not really using and spent a lot of time ribbing my psychology friends for their terrible rigour. "Let's ask 1000 people a personal question then apply statistics to it. This proves xyz about the human condition" Communist Thoughts has issued a correction as of 14:12 on Sep 9, 2021 |
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Sep 9, 2021 14:07
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gradenko_2000 posted:"Iraq did 9/11, and they're linked to Al-Qaeda" was a conspiracy theory "Scientists are faking data to prove climate change" and mocking the "hockey stick graph" came about in the Bush years and "Climategate" is still a thing conservatives toss around despite being debunked a thousand times.
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Sep 9, 2021 14:11
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https://mobile.twitter.com/PostOpinions/status/1435979914767896583
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Sep 10, 2021 03:43
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Communist Thoughts posted:I think pandemic magement is probably a situation amenable to the application of science. The issue there is the CDC is full of poo poo. lol i saw a twitter retort of "fauci IS the science" and i wanted to throw up
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Sep 10, 2021 04:07
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mawarannahr posted:my coworker’s dad died this week and it was a bummer. I ha w other coworkers who bring their cats out on zoom to entertain me. I’m way closer to the people I only met once IRL than I’ve been at any other job. maybe the New York Times is filled with boring people. Being WFH taught me my job was full of trite in-office poo poo
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Sep 10, 2021 04:10
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i think the issue has been that there is epidemiology, the science that looks at pandemic and how disease spreads, and then there's public health policy which tries to figure out how to understand what the boys in the lab are telling them and translate that to some kind of policy, which is subject to all the whims of technocratic oversight, the whims of politicians, and the whims of the public telling them to gently caress off
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Sep 10, 2021 04:19
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she's a literal fascist, but ok
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Sep 10, 2021 05:20
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