"I've always said that I'm agnostic on whether... so there are observed test score differences between groups, I think that's clear, you can't deny that.
The causality of that, whether it's partially due to genetics, I've always been agnostic on. Not because I think it's impossible, but because it's such a charged thing we should really make sure the science is solid before we speculate. We shouldn't randomly speculate on something that sensitive.
But even just not being willing to categorically rule out that God could have created us with average group differences has gotten me into trouble. And I think that's just absurd. So for someone to attack me for saying 'We don't know the answer to this question, let's do the science first and then talk about it.' Even that position is actually not tenable in the current social justice warrior political climate."
A) I hope it's not true. I would much rather live in a world where there are not big group differences.
Number 2) I understand why it's a sensitive issue. Because it was used in a way to oppress people for a long time. So I'm not blind to that.
Number 3) I am a scientist. So when I say something like 'The results of the studies do not allow us to come to a high confidence conclusion about it.' That's what I'm going to say. So I've been attacked because I haven't been willing to categorically rule something out, which I think is absurd..."
"The scores are, as you say, you do the tests, you find differences. However there are differences in average environment that these people experience. So the really difficult statistical question is, is it the difference in average environment these people experience, or is it genes. And it's a very difficult question..."
> I hope it's not true. I would much rather live in a world where there are not big group differences.
This is why these questions are deemed dangerous. They have the possibility of challenging and upsetting deeply held beliefs and narratives. What is there to fear but an observation and the data it’s based on?
There aren't big population-level differences, aside from basic cosmetic differences due to genetic drift [0]. Humans act as one single species, with one single pedigree [2], lacking any selfish genes which speciate us further.
Genes within a single species' gene pool follow a Poisson distribution because they are randomly permuted [1][3][4], assuming the pool is large enough. This means that often, some genes will be popular for no good reason; that is, these popular genes are cosmetic. When, for example, most people in the world follow one of several popular skin-coloration patterns, that does not therefore imply any sort of fitness function is selecting for skin colors, because the null hypothesis that they are randomly permuted has so little problem explaining how they could arise without any effect on fitness.
These questions aren't dangerous because they somehow subvert existing institutions, but because they're a direct introduction to ethnofascism via eugenics. We should roundly not just reject them based on empirical observations and data, but also based on theory and modelling; this is because we can then use contraposition to flip around various deductions. For example, people often ask whether "race" affects "intelligence" and point to survey data which shows correlations; using contraposition, and understanding that "race" is a social construction, we can refute the idea that "intelligence" is innate and suggest instead that it is tied to socioeconomic status or quality of education or other confounders.
I would end with a question: What observations and data, exactly, are you looking at? What conclusions have you drawn? Can we use contraposition to flip around any of those conclusions and find deeper or simpler truths?
I think you missed the forest for the trees in my comment.
> I would end with a question: What observations and data, exactly, are you looking at? What conclusions have you drawn? Can we use contraposition to flip around any of those conclusions and find deeper or simpler truths?
None. I'm arguing that if Professor Hsu wants to model an experiment and a thesis, collect data, arrive at a conclusion, and publish a paper, that should be absolutely fine and provoke no outrage, even if some feel "that's a direct introduction to ethnofascism via eugenics". Let the reader of the paper be the judge if it's "ethnofascism". I'm prioritizing the scientific method over hurt feelings.
> There aren't big population-level differences, aside from basic cosmetic differences due to genetic drift
What lets you assert that? There are most certainly genetic clusters that correspond to "races" - that's how sites like 23andMe work, after all. And these variations aren't just "melanin content" or "nose structure" - the obvious one is sickle-cell anemia, but a lot of other genetic disorders are racially correlated too.
My assertion in more detail. First, there aren't big population-level differences amongst random partitions of the single human race. There are population-level differences amongst geographic partitions, and humans are known to not travel especially far from where they are born, so that we might suspect genetic drift is happening; humans tend to not spread genes very far geographically. Indeed, there are countless examples of genetic drift in humans.
Second, those drift differences are largely cosmetic, and cosmetic on average. Both properties follow from differences being Gaussian distributed with respect to fitness; the typical drifted gene is neither especially fit nor especially unfit.
Third, as gene pools grow, the ability to control for fitness on a per-gene basis shrinks exponentially, so that the behavior of the pool is like a random permutation. To see this, imagine a picky procreator choosing from a list of suitors by genetic partition; at each stage, they will reject some suitors who have the wrong allele. The pool randomly combines each pair of alleles (because it is deep enough to hold every viable combination), so each rejection removes roughly the same proportion of suitors every time. Thus, a linear list of picked alleles requires an exponentially-large list of suitors to choose from!
Aside: This third fact is why breeding dogs gives us pugs with their poor breathing and also why breeding tends to give us lots of hip dysplasia across different breeds. We can only positively select for a relatively small handful of traits and alleles, and each selection allows thousands of selfish genes to join the entourage, giving us patterns of unwanted gene expression.
None of these facts preclude services like 23andMe; we can certainly write down lists of clustered alleles which correspond to drifted genes, and use that information to correlate people with the geographic history of their ancestors, on a probabilistic basis. (Remember, large gene pools are randomly permuted, so these services must be probabilistic.)
None of these facts preclude some genes from being selected for fitness, either. Let's examine sickle-cell anemia more closely. Sometimes a mutation can improve an allele's fitness when one copy of the gene is present, but two copies results in a poor allele. Sickle cell is a very good example of this. Having one copy gives the "sickle cell trait", which resists malaria. It has a bunch of other minor health effects, positive and negative, but resisting malaria is sufficient to allow the gene variant to stay in the gene pool.
What I'm saying is that, just because some people have sickle-cell anemia, that doesn't therefore change the fact that people are all of the same species. If folks want to talk about which individual genes they have, then they should do that, and not talk about race, because genes only stick together in geographic clusters probabilistically, due to drift.
So you want to reject someone's will to collect more empirical observations and data on a certain issue... based on empirical observations and data you already have?
This makes absolutely no sense. Either we can investigate some issues, or we can't. @markdown is a bit more honest when they say we should not research the issue at all, because the answer is very unpleasant. But note that race is only the ultimate taboo in the west; researchers elsewhere, in particular in China, will continue this research. And I think it's worth having people in the west researching this area, so they understand this research and can, indeed, challenge it when necessary.
Okay, please, go ahead and investigate these issues. What have you found? I am summarizing a well-understood consensus position, not exploring some novel theory. You can research the issue as much as you like, and find as many spurious "unpleasant" correlations as you like; this does not dislodge the fact that race is a social and cultural construction rather than some genetic reality.
I do not want to shut down research, but I do want to point out that the research which contradicts Hsu is already done and the theories which explain why he is wrong are already understood.
Your position on this issue is not based on reason or science, but on dogma.
Nothing is ever really settled. And certainly not that topic in particular. How could it be, considering how controversial it is? (This very topic is another proof.)
>the fact that race is a social and cultural construction rather than some genetic reality
That is an absurd claim. I'm well aware of the sensitivity around this topic. I wish we could research it freely, but I can see why people get very agitated about certain findings. I can see why it's unpleasant. Still, just like you can't research dermatology, immunology and other fields of medicine without taking race into account (the idea that racial differences are only skin deep completely breaks down when it comes to finding bone marrow donors), if it turns out that there are also racial difference in cognitive or behavioral traits, it's important to know for research on diseases like Alzheimer, or indeed for research on psychology, sociology, etc.
>> the fact that race is a social and cultural construction rather than some genetic reality
> That is an absurd claim.
Indeed. Idpol/woke ideology posits one outlandish race-realist conception of race to use as a strawman in order to claim that race is but a social construct, and simultaneously advances another (implicitly race-realist) conception of race that's shallow and incoherent in order to license its moral claims. It's a mechanism of manipulation.
"Race" is an ambiguous term — it has to be operationalized to be used coherently. There's a sense of the term that describes a social reality and another that describes ancestry groupings.
This is a great primer for anyone who's interested:
> What is there to fear but an observation and the data it’s based on?
There is everything to fear. This is one issue for which a definitive answer (if not the correct one) could be catastrophically damaging to relations between humans forever.
I disagree. A group’s lack of emotional fortitude is inhibiting the search for truth and progress as a species. Life is unfair, full stop. I’m unsure how learning it’s genetic changes the situation. If anything, it gives us a better understanding about how to approach the situation.
The ignorant may keep the bliss. We are not served by putting our heads in the sand for the sake of political correctness.
One thing to keep in mind, is whether the difference is big enough to matter. I used to think the same as you, then I talked to my wife about a study I'd read that said the top end of male IQ is higher than the top end of female IQ, even if they are the same on average. She pointed out how even though there is a difference at the top end, it's not significant enough to matter (which is true). So there is no upside to publishing the research, but there is a definite downside of sexists/racists using the research to say "See, X is genetically inferior to us, that's why we shouldn't treat them the same". I don't think any particluar research should be banned, but the researchers should have the moral integrity to think about the impact of their research.
> "See, X is genetically inferior to us, that's why we shouldn't treat them the same".
Hiding science is not the way you attack bigots; you attack their immoral views directly.
My partner and I used IVF to have our first child. We had several fertilized embryos result. We were given the option of DNA sequencing and implanting embryos that met our genetic criteria. We didn't opt for it, but if we decide to have additional children and the data showed we could select for traits that were important to us (intelligence, height, athletically predisposed), I would absolutely opt for it. You want the best for your children (in my experience), and this is yet another selector in life to give them every advantage.
So, I do keep these things in mind. This research is going to occur (if not in the US, likely China), regardless of the uncomfortable feelings of vocal opponents. Get comfortable or get left behind.
> if we decide to have additional children and the data showed we could select for traits that were important to us (intelligence, height, athletically predisposed), I would absolutely opt for it. You want the best for your children (in my experience), and this is yet another selector in life to give them every advantage.
Gwern has a nice article on embryo selection: [0] I think the summary is "it has moderate-to-large effects, and might be worth the money today, and almost certainly will be worth the money in ten years".
This was along the lines of thought for which Dr Hsu was accused of being okay with removing disabled people from human expression through a eugenics program.
Why is it wrong to want to remove disabilities from the genetic corpus of the human species? This is no different then wanting to cure any debilitating genetic condition [1] using gene therapy.
You treat existing humans with the utmost of respect, but you also target maladies so future humans have better quality of life (including a lack of disabilities).
Yes. I understand the fear and loathing some people feel, but I've been watching this research area for the past decade or so — it might move around, but it's not being shut down.
Differences at the top (and indeed bottom) end of the curve are important, because they might explain differences in achievement in certain professions. There was a recent case with an Italian physicist from CERN getting in trouble for using that very argument (if the IQ curve for men is broader, this would explain why there are more men than women at the top of that profession).
I note that we don't have issues with men being over-represented on the other side of the curve (mental issues, violence, etc.) We're not calling the police "systematically sexist" despite the fact that most of the police shooting victims are men, for example. There is no call to have gender equality in prisons or mental hospitals.
No one is against learning. There is a difference between an academic dispassionately studying the subject and a man trying to harm other people by saying stuff like this[1]. What the academics must not do is give their credibility to such people.
I would be just as upset if a smallpox researcher agreed to be interviewed by someone interested in reintroducing smallpox to the public, and seeing the researcher giving them the scientifically accurate information about how to do it.
Um, what? We don't have enough data to confirm or deny the existence of average group differences between major races, but we have pretty good data to be able to eliminate large differences. Even Ashkenazi Jews, who are supposed to have average IQ 1 standard deviation above the mean, aren't a superrace - sure, they are overrepresented amongst Nobel laureates, but many of them are still stupid.
Basically, a small +-5 IQ point difference doesn't change the big picture that much - still most people between 80 and 120, and some outliers below and above that.
From what I can tell, ignorance is really only bliss for the privileged. When refusing to study the mechanics underlying a disadvantage, we are condemning those on the wrong side of that disadvantage to suffer indefinitely...
LOL, how do you propose to fix the genes of a group if indeed it is found that their genes are the cause of their circumstances?
You have it backwards. The privileged are losing their privileges, and desperately seeking to find ways to justify why they should remain privileged. It is these people who desire to find evidence that proves their existing deeply-held belief that they're special, because "god" made them so and that others are genetically inferior.
>Not because I think it's impossible, but because it's such a charged thing we should really make sure the science is solid before we speculate. We shouldn't randomly speculate on something that sensitive.
I think he doesn't go far enough. Its not enough to just "not speculate," you have to also be responsible with how you use your reputation as a researcher in the field. As an analogy, it doesn't matter how principled or academic a political philosopher's belief in state's rights is, he'll lose his credibility if he agrees to speak at a bunch of racist confederate organizations. Even if he sticks to a boring non-racist script.
There is a movement out there seeking to drape their racist ideas in the trappings of science and reason. This researcher knows this. He ought to view it as his responsibility to make sure his good name is not attached to that movement. He could stay completely inside his ivory tower until he has the solid science, or he could heavily screen the media he speaks to. He has very clearly failed in that responsibility by going on Mr. "Humanity is not a single species[1]" Molyneux's show and saying that he thinks appealing to the environment as an explanation for group differences in IQ is a-scientific.
Guilt by association is wrong in a logical sense, as well as in a moral one, and even if it's so commonly practiced that we forget that, we shouldn't go the extra step and enshrine it into our laws or culture.
Good thing I am not accusing Hsu of being guilty of the same crimes as the people who he has lent his name to. Those people are racist, Hsu is academically irresponsible.
But he was accused of being racist, due to his association with someone else, and this is why he was forced to resign.
I think you're saying the following:
Even though you do not necessarily consider him guilty of racism by association with Molyneux, the fact that some people consider him guilty of racism by association is enough for him to have committed an act worthy of public shame.
If that's true, then call it guilt through association, but to my mind it's a distinction without a practical difference.
The practical difference is that the association was in Hsu's professional capacity. That is to say, he didn't decide to join the same bowling league as Molyneux as a random guy, he went on Molyneux's show as an academic authority on the science of race and said what Molyneux wanted to hear.
I have heard Molyneux's fans say to me that they were drawn to Molyneux's racist ideas "because he just applies science" and pointed to Hsu's interviews (and others) as evidence of this. Hsu enabled that not by association in general, but in this specific form of association which some people have interpreted as endorsement.
There are plenty of other professions with ethics rules prohibiting certain associations due to how those associations may be perceived, e.g. large companies have antitrust guidelines that prohibit associations that may cause the perception of anti-competitive behavior.
Yes, that's how it should be. Power should be constantly challenged, and taken away extemely easily. Eventually maybe people will stop talking it and we can decentralize society more.
I'm currently a student of Michigan State. While I don't like Dr. Hsu very much (and I see more merit to the criticisms of him than I suspect many here) I see this as grievous damage to my university. This will be proof that researchers should be scared what they say will incite a twitter mob against them and get them fired. Instead, they should be insulated from public backlash and not be afraid to say what they believe no matter how controversial. Lacking that, the entire purpose of research universities (and with it our ability to speak of a consensus among experts) is corrupted.
I suppose it is fair to say speech of those in leadership positions with executive power is chilled by this. I think that's how its supposed to be though. Part of being in leadership is managing relationships with stakeholders. Part of it is being beyond reproach. Undisclosed conflicts of interest on published papers is not a small thing for an Executive at a university. Being responsible in an academic honesty sense is important in that position I think.
The problem is that he was largely removed for refusing to lie about the state of the science. But the state of the science is not politically acceptable.
Scientific consensus is pretty heavily on the side of "50+% of within-group variation in intelligence is genetic, the remainder is non-shared environment" (in the US, barring known negative confounders such as fetal alcohol syndrome), and as far as I know the science on between-group variation is still very much undecided, but genetic components are as far from ruled out as you can get. But that debate won't be settled until you can 1) find the environmental differences that lead to IQ differences between groups, including (IIRC) in adopted children, 2) show that IQ tests only correlate with g within ethnic groups, but not across them, or 3) decode the genetic basis of IQ and show how differing frequencies explain group differences. Which is going to take a number more years, no matter which it ends up being.
Fringe view among geneticists, or fringe view among the public? (And honestly, I'd like to see those criticisms - I'd hate to be defending a guy who's genuinely wrong instead of just politically incorrect, which has been the impression I've had so far from SSC and elsewhere)
> IQ scores are heritable: that is, within populations, genetic variation is related to variation in the trait. But a fundamental truism about heritability is that it tells us nothing about differences between groups. Even analyses that have tried to calculate the proportion of the difference between people in different countries for a much more straightforward trait (height) have faced scientific criticisms. Simply put, nobody has yet developed techniques that can bypass the genetic clustering and removal of people that do not fit the statistical model mentioned above, while simultaneously taking into account all the differences in language, income, nutrition, education, environment, and culture that may themselves be the cause of differences in any trait observed between different groups. This applies to any trait you could care to look at – height, specific behaviours, disease susceptibility, intelligence.
So I think we got fundamentally different things from that article. You see "between-population differences aren't genetic". I see "we don't know if between-population differences are genetic or environmental, and with our techniques we don't think this is knowable". Which, funnily enough, matches this quote of Hsu's pretty strongly (quoted elsewhere in these comments)
> "I've always said that I'm agnostic on whether... so there are observed test score differences between groups, I think that's clear, you can't deny that.
> The causality of that, whether it's partially due to genetics, I've always been agnostic on. Not because I think it's impossible, but because it's such a charged thing we should really make sure the science is solid before we speculate. We shouldn't randomly speculate on something that sensitive.
> But even just not being willing to categorically rule out that God could have created us with average group differences has gotten me into trouble. And I think that's just absurd. So for someone to attack me for saying 'We don't know the answer to this question, let's do the science first and then talk about it.' Even that position is actually not tenable in the current social justice warrior political climate."
Disqualify him from being a professor? He’s still a tenured full professor with a nice salary. He’s just no longer in charge of all research at the university.
That's not the point. On this particular sub-thread we're discussing his research. You said he has fringe views. I'm just saying that it does not disqualify his research per se.
Otherwise, I have no background or in fact interest about whether or not Steve Hsu was a good VP of research and innovation. The reason given for why he's being fired for this position has nothing to do with his performance, good or bad, and has everything to do with his research. Since he his tenured, they can't fire him for his research, so they found an other way to punish him. That's low.
Agreed and of course. He can and should continue his research as a well paid full professor at MSU, which I assume he will. He gets a lot of attention for doing so. Otherwise he’d just be a random really bad quantitative geneticist you’ve never heard of that thinks that no one else but him understands L2 regression.
We all look at history and view the Church as both stupid and evil for arresting Galileo when he published evidence that Earth revolved around the sun. Why do we look at history that way and how is Steve Hsu different from Galileo?
Don't like his facts/scientific methods/conclusions? Fight them with other facts and methods and conclusions!
When you try and suppress the scientific method (especially in the age of the internet), you give the conspiracy theorists and white supremacists ammunition for a new generation of recruits. "Here are the facts they are hiding from you!"- they'll say. Fight ideas with better ideas, not by firings.
>However, these categories overlap & are all rooted in Hsu’s beliefs in innate biological differences between human populations, especially regarding intelligence --an unscientific position which makes him unsuited to direct a research institution’s funding or its graduate studies
Humans are, biologically, extremely diverse. Visible attributes, disease risk, geometry of the physical body, etc. Some groups are more prone to certain genetic disease risk factors, for example.
Doesn't it follow that the brains of different groups of humans might group into certain traits, including intelligence?
I'm asking in all sincerity. I'd love to hear if there's some evidence that my thinking is wrong.
The current argument is weasly though, approaching it as follows:
Race is a social construct and not a genetic one. Humans exist on a genetic spectrum. Therefore you can't box humans into distinct groups there. Therefore racial differences are moot.
This is based off the grad student unions linked sources. It's also weasly as all fuck. Race may be a social construct, but it does correlate strongly with a number of genetic factors. As such, race serves as an aggregate variable for a large quantity of genetic variation. And it can be shown that between populations of different race, there's an observable difference at a genetic level.
It's complicated. One thing we do know is that the variance in intelligence is larger than any group differences. People therefore often assume that anyone that insists on emphasizing the average difference is using it as a dog-whistle for some kind of bias. Whether the principle of charity should be applied or not is up to you.
There is no singular "intelligence" and measuring it is certainly not linear. Splitting hairs between a population of people (specifically blacks) who only 200 years ago were killed for being able to read certainly doesn't make for a compelling or worthy investment in research.
> There is no singular "intelligence" and measuring it is certainly not linear.
Wanna bet? I think most intelligence researchers would disagree with you, and IQ is predictive of life outcomes.
There are areas where you can find fault with Hsu's work, but I don't think "IQ approximates g, and g is real" is one of them.
For that matter... If a population was killed according to a trait, wouldn't that make it more likely for there to be genetic causes of group differences in that trait?
"Intelligence research" is, like most of psychology, an elaborate grift designed to give a handful of people cushy tenured jobs. Actual geneticists, that is, people who study how genes actually work, wouldn't touch the standards of rigor of "intelligence research" with a ten foot pole. Note how people supporting Hsu tend to be psychologists while people dismissing his research tend to be geneticists. It's also worth nothing that Hsu is also out-of-field himself (he used to be a physicist) and only got recently into genomics. That he got stuff wrong that's basically understoood by the whole genetics community isn't that surprising.
> "Intelligence research" is, like most of psychology, an elaborate grift designed to give a handful of people cushy tenured jobs. Actual geneticists, that is, people who study how genes actually work, wouldn't touch the standards of rigor of "intelligence research" with a ten foot pole.
Wow, that's... Misguided. Most intelligence research doesn't have to do with genetics at all, to start with. Second, twin studies have shown that intelligence is highly heritable, with about half of variance explained by genetics (and half "non-shared environment", also known as random chance) - we might not know what genes are responsible, but you don't need to know the genes to compare identical and fraternal twins. Finally... IQ is real is one of a very small number of psychology studies that reproduces consistently, so the normal "psychology is bunk" objections don't apply.
>Second, twin studies have shown that intelligence is highly heritable, with about half of variance explained by genetics (and half "non-shared environment", also known as random chance) - we might not know what genes are responsible, but you don't need to know the genes to compare identical and fraternal twins.
Heritability does not imply the existence of a genetic mechanism. Twin studies have a number of flaws that further demonstrate my points about standards of methodology that geneticists wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Even not taking into account stuff like equal environment assumption, identical twins simply do not have the same DNA. Yes, even identical twins, look it up. There are also a number of things that are heritable without involving a genetic mechanism at all, such as the various microbiomes or epigenetics. And of course there are things like transmission of de novo mutations over up to two generations (e.g. affecting germinal cells of one's fetus).
Regarding the 'IQ is the best finding we have on psychologist' point. Being the best in a field that's a largely grift doesn't make one any less of a grift. IQ (and g) still has flaws that no one in the hard science would consider it. For instance, it is gaussian for no reason and despite most social outcomes performances being fat-tailed, meaning the theoretical covariance between IQ and any kind of relevant task is undefined (and its in-sample variance finite but meaningless). There's also zero neurological or genetic data confirming the existence of g, making it a purely imaginary construct that only exists in the minds of psychologists. That this is the best they can come up with just speaks even worse of the field as a whole.
> Heritability does not imply the existence of a genetic mechanism. Twin studies have a number of flaws that further demonstrate my points about standards of methodology that geneticists wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Even not taking into account stuff like equal environment assumption, identical twins simply do not have the same DNA. Yes, even identical twins, look it up. There are also a number of things that are heritable without involving a genetic mechanism at all, such as the various microbiomes or epigenetics. And of course there are things like transmission of de novo mutations over up to two generations (e.g. affecting germinal cells of one's fetus).
...I think you're missing how twin studies work, here. Yes, they can't distinguish between epigenetic and genetic traits, but they DON'T require twins to have identical genetics, and DON'T require equal environments. Specifically, they work by
1. Measuring the correlation in identical twin IQs (or other traits)
2. Measuring the correlation in fraternal twin IQs (or other traits)
3. Comparing the correlations. If identical twins have a 50% correlation and fraternal twins 25%, well...
Identical twins not having identical genetics makes it harder to find genetic influence, but doesn't make it impossible. (it just means that the twins share 99.9...% of varying DNA instead of 100%, which is still far above fraternal twins and enough to establish a difference) And the reason you use twins is to control for varying environments. (And for that matter both identical and fraternal twins will share germinal cells/microbiomes/etc, too)
Yes, it's fuzzier than a physics experiment. But it's certainly not worse than "this gene causes a 0.1% increase in the chance of breast cancer".
I am "actually sincere" and I did take the time to read that.
TLDR:
A very long, rambling blog post that essentially says "yeah there's probably genetic differences related to IQ among groups of humans but...", then proceeds to dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as part of "a vocal fringe of race pseudoscience".
Lol; what I thought. Do you just make up things you put in quotes? That’s not what those characters are meant for.
The “long, rambling blog post” outlines a number of pieces of evidence that say it’s highly unlikely there are meaningful differences, and because of population stratification, stuff like GWAS (that Hsu uses) can’t give us a lot of info. Look, if you have questions or doubts about these criticisms, you can ask and people will take those questions seriously. Ewan Birney is a world class geneticist that leads Europe’s leading institute on the subject. He’s writing a blog post for lay people to help them understand the complexities. What you wrote in response just shows how blinded you are in just discounting other arguments.
Look, I don’t know who you are; you can look me up (https://www.octant.bio/biosri).. but maybe when most experts in a field are saying one thing, and one person on the fringe is saying another... you at least owe it to yourself to understand the dominant viewpoint. It’s easy to find my email, or Ewan’s or many other researchers that take a lot of time answering questions. Quantitative genetics is complicated and in that blog post he’s trying to break down the major ways people get this stuff wrong; including Hsu. But in general, most on this site thus far have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct. Anyways, if you are not a layperson I apologize and as a researcher, you can always just publish your findings, and the community and I can learn from them.
Hey, I saw you posted a few comments saying that it's highly unlikely that there are "meaningful" differences. So even if we leave the "obvious" differences between populations like skin color aside as not "meaningful", do you have any sources that explain (or if you want to yourself) the "obvious" or "well-known" differences between groups, such as Dutch height, Ashkenazi intelligence or Kalenjin running endurance? Sincere question, I'm genuinely curious as I can't think of any other obvious explanation than "genetic group differences" (and it's kind-of hard to Google for).
First. I’d say read the blog post I linked to above. To answer your question on the “well-known” differences; they definitely are real and genetic. It’s just that IQ and most measures of intelligence look nothing like those traits. The common variants that are tagged in GWAS for IQ are also not different from a variant distribution standpoint. Again, the blog lays this out. There are thousands of papers on this topic. Good books to read are David Reich’s book (which does enter this more touchy territory) and ‘She has her mothers laugh’ for a more general reading. Ewan’s blog in general is also really good as well. In terms of papers, there are a bunch of recent ones that are quite good. Will need more time to post but they tend to be covered by Ewan.
I don't quite understand what the point is. The main crux of it seems to be "argument by obfuscation", a lot of deferral to
(scientific) authority and a lot of "sophiscated" words (hoping that the reader will also defer to authority).
The author seems to argue something like: we can't know this because (1) genetics are complicated, (2) we don't have enough
data, (3) the data that we do have is hard to understand, and (4) even if we could draw conclusions from the data, we couldn't
generalize them on other populations. This seems like a coop-out - I'm 100% that in the future, we'll have more data, and
we'll have better tools to understand the data, so whatever conclusions we make, will be that much more certain.
Also, part of the author's argument seems to be "there wasn't significant evolutionary pressure on these traits". So what?
Obviously there are differences in traits that have no evolutionary pressure (e.g. why do SE Asians have slanted eyes? was
there some evolutionary pressure for that?), there's lack of differences even when there is evolutionary pressure (e.g.
female sex selection seems to prefer height, yet non-Dutch Europeans and SE Asians are smaller; in addition, the latter
haven't developed ability to digest
milk after infancy, despite presumably the same evolutionary pressures); finally, there's traits that do conform to
evolutionary pressure, including all of the ones I highlight above (tall Dutch, smart Jews, fast Kenyans). Either different
populations face different evolutionary pressures so have developed different traits, or all populations face the same
evolutionary pressures and some have failed to develop some traits. In any case, it's more than possible that there are
population-wide differences even in heritable IQ, and we just can't confirm or deny that yet (we already know there are
"sub-population-wide" differences, e.g. Ashkenazi Jews).
Part of the authors argument is also that because most studies are done on Europeans, they can't be generalized. Again,
irrelevant. The examples I pointed out are "within population" - Kalenjin run faster than other Kenyans, Dutch are taller
than other Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other Europeans and other Jews.
The author also argues that it's somehow invalid to exclude recent "immigrants" when studying a population. Why? Obviously
if I study Ashkenazi Jew IQ, I'd exclude other (non-Jewish) Europeans, as well as non-Ashkenazi Jews (e.g. Sephardi) and
those who are not genetically Ashkenazi Jews (e.g. people who recently converted to the religion). I can't see how that
would be "unscientific".
> it is virtually inconceivable that the primary determinant of racial categories – that is skin colour – is strongly
associated with the genetic architecture that relates to intelligence.
The author either lacks imagination, or his/her imagination is stifled by political correctness. We know this claim is
false, as "race" is associated with height (Europeans are on average taller than SE Asians - and I looked up Japan
specifically, a first-world country, so don't "nutrition" me), which is also a complex trait.
To conclude, there's only 3 possible answers to the question of "Why are Ashkenazi Jews smarter?": (1) They aren't.
(2) It's (mostly) genetic. and (3) It's mostly not genetic (nutrition, culture, etc.). I don't see the author's incoherent
rambling (you can see that I've become more and more disappointed by the article as I read it) arguing in either of these
directions, in particular I don't see any argument to dismiss (2), except a few weak sauce non-arguments that I criticize
above. I also don't see anything against Steve Hsu's argument, which is basically that IQ & height are at least partially
genetic, we'll soon be able to predict them from genes, then we'll be able to use it in embryo selection.
Therefore, I'm going to summarily dismiss your argument and disregard other sources you suggest, unless you can come up
with a short counterargument to (2) above that doesn't fail in the silly ways as this article does.
Edit: This isn't to say that I'm not open to other explanations... Maybe Kalenjin just are training better. Maybe Ashkenazi just are rearing their children better. Maybe the Dutch are eating the right food that makes them grow taller. But I find that unlikely (their secrets would have gotten out already) and in any case, I'm mainly just saying that we can't dismiss either explanation.
Besides the insults, there are a couple of real scientific questions. Despite my better judgement... :
1. 'evolutionary pressure on traits' -> so what? It's important, because we are usually much better powered at detecting purifying selection in traits.
2. As for the slanted eyes: why do you think there was no pressure? Assortative mating is a thing.. it's very prevalent in visible traits and really makes this hard.
3. Preference for height... umm ok - this is weird. There are plenty of known examples for purifying height selection in either direction. However, these are rare variants and not the major driver of height variation within bigger populations. Height is actually a good example for looking at variation within populations: https://elifesciences.org/articles/39702
Basically it says that population stratification is a major problem for things that are easily measurable like height (unlike intelligence, which is much harder to measure and way more likely to have known social covariates).
4. In general, you aren't even understanding the simplified responses that the authors are trying to explain, but also can't seem to grasp there might be more that you are not understanding – and just ascribe things to lack of imagination or political correctness of the authors.. who are world class geneticists. You can lead a camel to water...
Sorry I haven’t replied, I didn’t have the time to read the article yet, and your reply isn’t very substantial...
If I understa correctly, your point is that there are things that are easy to see (matters for sexual selection) and/or measure (matters for science) and IQ is neither... but those aren’t the only causes of genetic differences? You also have survival pressure (presumably running faster would be here) and just random drift as well (presumably that’s how slanted eyes and blond hair first developed). You didn’t answer which of the options I listed regarding Jewish IQ is correct. Alternatively, why are humans smarter than chimps?
Also, regarding your (4), scientists are notorious for submitting to pressure from the wokeness mob, and in touchy subjects like genetics in particular, so it’s not an unreasonable assumption on my part.
>Do you just make up things you put in quotes? That’s not what those characters are meant for.
The two "quotes" in my comment:
>>[...] that essentially says "yeah there's probably genetic differences related to IQ among groups of humans but..." [...]
English isn't my first language, but it's crystal clear that this isn't a direct quote but is a summary of my thoughts on their argument.
>>[...] "a vocal fringe of race pseudoscience".
If you read your own link you would know that this is a direct quote.
But please, continue to educate me on punctuation.
>What you wrote in response just shows how blinded you are in just discounting other arguments.
That's rich coming from someone who started their comment with "Lol; what I thought." And someone who started their first reply to my original comment by questioning my sincerity.
>But in general, most on this site thus far have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct.
Finally, what was the point of trying to flex your credentials? You spent an entire comment reinforcing the idea that academics like you "have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct."
So again, you have no substantive questions/comments on the criticisms brought up in the blog post other than to call it long and rambling. Nothing on how common variants associated with intelligence don't segregate substantially across populations. Nothing on the poor accounting for population stratification; nothing on lack of replication on populations outside the regressions; nothing on effect sizes; nothing on IQ test score changes over time that are too short for genetic changes...
anyways, the flex is because you now know who I am and what I research. If you have serious questions about the above topics... the same topics for why most people don't take Hsu seriously, feel free to email them to me. In the meantime, I am laughing because you were anything but sincere.
>So again, you have no substantive questions/comments on the criticisms brought up in the blog post other than to call it long and rambling.
And you have no reply to my criticisms of your sarcastic, ad hominem filled reply.
>>You spent an entire comment reinforcing the idea that academics like you "have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct."
Sorry, didn't actually see any scientific criticisms or questions in any of your replies; just your "sincere" request for more information, which I gave you. You just don't seem interested in learning more.
There weren't any. I am criticizing the nasty tone you took from the outset in assuming I am not sincere, which is wrong. I'm not a biologist, so I obviously could have missed something in that blog post. But, I shared my impression of it nonetheless, since this is a board for discussion.
I know what it's like to achieve an extremely high level of expertise in a narrow field; I've done it myself. It forever blinds you to the way a novice sees the same field.
If you've ever wondered why there's increasing skepticism of academia, you should read your comments again. They are nasty, sarcastic, and dismissive.
I'll paste this one more time because I think you need to seriously consider that you are exhibiting exactly the behavior that you're accusing others of:
>[...] have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct.
I wasn't being sarcastic. I was saying that if you are actually sincere, and I was hopeful you were, I said to to take the time to read the blog post (knowing it was long); they go through great lengths to explain to people not in the field what the issues with work like Hsu's. It wasn't meant to be mean. You dismissed it, failed to try to understand it, and were incredibly inconsiderate calling it long and rambling. This is when my tone changed, and in my opinion deservedly so. It indicated to me you were being insincere about spending the time to learn more. Considering how many racist trolls I deal with that do this kind of thing often, your dismissiveness made me think you weren't actually interested in learning more. I gave my information, pointed to the things that you were misunderstanding in that blog, and offered if you have scientific questions, I am happy to take more time to try to answer them. That offer still stands.
There is a simple solution to this: no one other than card-carrying scientists working exclusively on the evolution of intelligence should blurt out their opinions on this topic. This question should be clubbed with other questions which are always easy traps for any scientist into believing their opinion is valuable just because they "know how to do science". Better just stick to what field of science you are good and shut up about socially charged questions of no relevance to you.
In this guy's, case, it is arguable if he's in the field. He seems to have already made up his mind on it, he's just out to find proof of his hypothesis. This is in principle fine, but he should acknowledge that by choosing to study this field, he excludes himself from any position where he's in charge of teaching or training people - he seems to sincerely believe that some of them are dumber by their nature, that seeems like a massive conflict of interest to me.
"no racial bias in police shootings" is something I've seen from a few studies. It all depends on how you define "racial bias", of course. (In other words, in a given situation police shootings seem to be even across races - but those situations are less common for non-hispanic whites and far less common for asians than for african americans)
I'm surprised how one sided the conversation is here.
This isn't "mob rule," this is the reasoned opinions of skilled scientists saying that Hsu's political opinions are 1) not backed by the science, and 2) establish strong ground to believe that he will not use his position of power fairly.
People have a right to be judged fairly in their careers, and those in leadership positions should not be unfairly prejudiced by bad beliefs. It might be fine for a tenured physics professor, but it's not OK for somebody making hiring and promotion decisions.
1. The idea that someone’s political views are not backed by science is a pretty bold claim. Who decides what political views are acceptably scientific?
2. Strong grounds? Is it possible to quickly present strong grounds in a twitter thread? Up until today he has done well in his job, and no one seemed to have a problem with him for 8 years. His boss or colleagues. Now, suddenly, we have deep concerns about how he hires people... why exactly? Because his political views aren’t scientific?
This is tribal mob rule under the guise of a sophisticated intellectual rationalization.
In which it seems many of these criticisms were well known at least a year ago. I hadn't previously followed this, but it seems like this was probably a case of the dam finally bursting.
On what planet should “shutdown STEM” be a reasonable position to hold in the middle of a global pandemic where hundreds of thousands or millions of people’s lives depend on quality STEM research being done in a timely manner?
The hashtag is not #RestructureSTEM, it’s #ShutdownSTEM, and he’s apparently had it up for 11 days. In a pandemic killing hundreds of thousands, in all likelihood eventually millions, of people. In my view, that says all I need to know about this person. He’s a raging asshole.
This is the same problem, by the way, as the people tweeting #DefundPolice who get upset at people who think they want to abolish the police entirely. The word “defund” means to remove funding for, not to reduce funding for. It’s the height of arrogance to come up with a slogan either intentionally or accidentally using a word to mean something totally different from what it actually means, and then get upset that I am not willing to learn more about a movement that is effectively engaged in trolling.
You do not know what the hashtag means, have not bothered to research it, are ignoring somebody telling you what it means. Instead, from a few small characters you are extrapolating a bunch of nonsense that fits your own narrative, rather than seeking the truth.
I do not believe that there can be any productive conversation unless you decide to seek truth instead of seeking validation of your preconceived notions.
I don’t know anything about the specific dynamics of the problem — so perhaps you’re right. But I have a general problem with the catalyst to being removed being a twitter mob. Whether it should have happened long ago, was deserved, or not.
If people should be fired or removed from a position that’s fine, I don’t know Hsu beyond his blog. But this is a method that is dangerous to societal function.
Up until today? You have no idea what you are talking about. I have colleagues at the university that have been trying to have him removed for years; several have left in part because of him.
things are different nowadays, that's all. a few things have happened -- pandemic, injustices, etc... -- that is making people take stand and speak up.
i don't know much about the situation but your comment about people not calling out others for years doesn't mean things worth calling out someone for didn't happen...
There is a petition in support of him which also has some big names. That should be sufficient to warrant further investigation rather than immediately forcing him to resign.
Scott Aaronson
Scott Alexander
Sam Altman
Linda S. Gottfredson, Professor Emeritus, University of Delaware, Past President of the International Society for Intelligence Research
Jonathan Haidt, Professor, New York University Stern School of Business, USA
Geoffrey Miller
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
Robert Plomin, Professor, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London
Notice how none of them are actual geneticists. Prominent figures in the actual genetics community (e.g. Graham Coop or Ewan Birney) have dismissed most of his stuff.
I have no idea about Hsu's research, but if you think that 'skilled scientists' in academia are not often as ruthlessly political as anyone else then gosh, do I have some research bridge projects to sell to you.
In terms of a battle of signatures, I'm not sure how meaningful that is, given that there's a <huge> list of reputationally prestigious names backing Stephen Hsu.
These are people who are not arguing on any scientific basis, but rather against any evidence that we've collected and against further collection that might prove for or otherwise.
Those in leadership positions for a scientific position should not forge their beliefs on the political zeitgeist, but on sound methods and the data stemming thereof.
It's outlandishly tendentious. This is a moral panic. People are uninformed, and the media is being used keep people perpetually afraid of an imaginary fascist threat. Here's The Economist in 2005 on Ashkenazi intelligence, for example:
If the author's claims are true, I can hardly MSU for the decision.
A geneticist hosting and associating with a white supremacist and being a holocaust denier are not exactly the sort of academic liberty we should be standing up for.
Unz certainly is and Hsu seems to understand well his opinions on several matters.
"Hsu praised Unz for writing an article entitled “The Myth of American Meritocracy.” In the “Primary Bibliography” of that article Unz cited works by notorious scientific racist, Steve Sailer, two books by segregationist writer Nathaniel Weyl, and a book by Richard Lynn, well-known for his sloppy research on race, on “Jewish Intelligence and Achievement.” Lynn’s book was published by Richard Spencer, an alt right organizer of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
Years later, when Hsu hosted Unz on his podcast, Hsu describes Unz as “an old friend of mine.” Unz,the like Hsu was trained as a theoretical physicist. He also put his IQ as 214 on a job application once, which seems to impress Hsu. Me, I’d wonder about the kind of person who would claim such a thing since such "
That article says that a large part of why US university admissions aren't purely merit based... is that jewish students were better qualified, and university administrators didn't want a primarily-jewish student body, leading to changing admissions standards in the 1920s. He might cite people you're calling neo-nazis, but the article didn't seem anti-jewish to me at all.
EDIT: yeah, reading further... Ugh. Not exactly friendly, even if he doesn't seem to be insinuating we should fire up the ovens. (basically summarizable as "jews are now admitted at many times the rates they should be if you extrapolate from things like test scores, national merit scholars, or other academic-only criteria")
The main thrust of "The Myth of American Meritocracy" is to extensively document the evidence for Asian quotas being in effect at elite schools. These are no different from the Jewish quotas put in place to keep out Jews in the last century.
> a white supremacist and being a holocaust denier
Are these facts?
EDIT: It's sad that the notion of factualness gets constantly downvoted on HN, on an article about a science. Where will we be two or three years down the road?
I mean, have you looked at the resources linked on the Twitter thread he links to in that post? To call it "damning" is an understatement.
It would be different if he came out now and said "here are the things I said then, here's why I said them, and here are the reasons those were problematic and wrong; I no longer align myself with those views." But instead, he dug in his heels saying that this comes down to suppressing scientific inquiry for ... not buying into eugenics.
He’s doing research using newer high dimensional ML methods on the human genome to understand potential correlations with genetic information and other attributes, like general intelligence https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.2264
It’s a valid research subject, and like all research subjects, it could be wrong.
If people think some questions are too dangerous to ask, just admit that and be honest. Instead of just calling it problematic because it’s a potentially uncomfortable subject.
When there's a theory X you want to stamp out, it's way more effective to maintain a false sense of freedom of inquiry, while setting high profile examples of theory X supporters/sympathizers/researchers being destroyed (here, "researchers" stand for people who merely want to explore the possibility). This way you can have a "manufactured consensus" which can be used to take down theory X supporters/sympathizers/researchers: "there's already a scientific consensus that X is outrageous", despite no opposition research being allowed (outspoken people taken down and discredited, other people too afraid to even explore the possibility); and each takedown only strengthens the "consensus" and makes future takedowns easier.
Not picking a side on this particular issue, but we're definitely seeing this kind of tactics unfold on multiple fronts.
Yes, the state of the art is to use social agitation to delegitimize an inconvenient argument altogether. It's as true in the academy as in politics — indeed the former is an extension of the latter.
Few, if any, of the concerns are directly about his research, but about the other things he does. In general I'd say that anyone doing research like Hsu's should be extra vigilant and careful, because their research will be used by "race realists" to push forth their theories. And legitimizing those views is bad.
If you want to ask these kinds of questions, you need to be sure that you can't be accused of a conflict of interest, Hsu's done, basically the exact opposite of that, and intentionally associated himself with some really uncomfortable people. That context has the consequence of throwing Hsu's motives into question as well.
Race realism is less of an extremist view than you seem to think it is (in that it's not an extremist view). Whether one infers extremist views from that position is another matter entirely.
There are multiple ways of operationalizing the notion of race. Some are prima facie invalid (usually these are used as straw men), some (as in the idpol/'woke' ideology's case) are incoherent and shallow but have political currency, and the rest are all valid within some range, conditional on context.
Race realism is, by definition an extremist view. It isn't the view that "race exists", as you seem to be implying, but that race and race science can be used to justify racism.
That is, race realism isn't "race exists", but that "black people have lower average IQs due mainly to genetics and so the status quo today is explained perfectly by genetic, and not environmental causes".
Such views are contradicted by most available evidence.
> that race and race science can be used to justify racism
You are incorrect. If 'race realism' has taken on that meaning in some discursive communities, understand that there are other understandings of the term.
Race realism is a descriptive claim that race has some basis in reality. There are no inherent normative implications to race realism.
Again, see the link in the preceding. In particular I recommend Chapter 3: "How to be a biological racial realist", by Quayshawn Spencer
Id refer you to the order of the definitions. Race realism as used in the scientific community may have a different connotation and definition, and is perhaps the reason why racists adopted the term, but no I'm not at all incorrect here about how the term is understood when used in a layperson context by people who are informed about race discussion.
> If 'race realism' has taken on that meaning in some discursive communities, understand that there are other understandings of the term.
Please remember that I said "race realism" and not race realism. And understand that I'm not uninformed here.
To reiterate, I'm not saying that scientists who research race are racist, I'm saying that if you research race and aren't a racist, you need to be extra careful to make that clear. Otherwise, as a pragmatic point, you'll end up like Dr. Hsu even if you are simply naive, and as a moral point, your naiveté will be used by actual racists to help legitimize their standpoint. That's why they self describe as "race realists", so they can say "look we're just like these other scientists who are studying race".
If you don't want your work and your authority to be coopted by racists, you need to proactively prevent them from doing so. Hsu did exactly the opposite and gifted actual racists his position and legitimacy. That's a problem no matter what his personal beliefs are.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, because it destroys what the site is for. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended.
He’s a hack. Most people in quantitative genetics think he’s a hack. He’s still a fully tenured professor making a lot of money & free to choose his research agenda. It’s just that he shouldn’t be head of research and really amazing faculty have left at least in part because of him.
In the same sense of "hack" used in "Hacker News", sure, perhaps.
A pattern that's repeated itself multiple times in the history of science is mathematicians and theoretical physicists showing up in other fields and making groundbreaking discoveries that end up re-orienting the field.
It's not at all surprising that incumbents would object to the competition, fault the 'interlopers' for not working within accepted paradigms, or just not have the background to fully understand their projects in the first place.
No. I’m faculty though and some of my best friends and colleagues are or were faculty there. I also research quantitative genetics. Been hearing the back story for years; many fear him and he threatened retaliation against some of my friends who were junior faculty.
Part of the scientific process is being skeptical and considering cases and asking probing questions. He didn’t make a blog post that said “lol racial bias is fake.” He discusses it with respect to research on the matter.
It seems you don’t feel that’s an acceptable question to ask: is racial bias in police shooting real?
I’d call that a dangerous question to ask, and try to answer honestly, because it could get a person fired.
First objection: He has tenure. Getting fired is very hard when you have tenure. As a tenured professor you can scream for years that the sky is neon green and you'll be fine.
Secondly, he doesn't particularly discuss it with respect nor realism. However, let's assume for the sake of discussion that we have the same view on that.
To be totally clear, being interviewed by someone implies absolutely nothing about agreement. For example, here's Noam Chomsky being interviewed by Molyneux:
Even more shockingly, you can interview with someone because they actually share some interest in what you research or do, and still not be in agreement with the interviewer's platform, as is the case in the linked interview.
Edit: removed section on 'misleading narratives' as, truthfully, I don't know enough about this specific case to comment much on it other than it has the hallmarks of a political hit job.
I agree with you on being interviewed. Bringing someone onto your podcast is more of an implicit endorsement unless you actively push back on their other views. If you don't know about those views, you should have done your research. But, if that was the case, he could have stated it. Imagine that he invited on a vocal flat earther, but discussed gardening with him. In his position, it raises doubts about judgement. If he says, "I didn't realize he was a flat earther--the earth is not flat", he probably keeps his job. But if he threatens to sue people who talk about his appearance on the show, it's a different story.
What concerns me primarily is the guilt by association. You also will see criticism about 'normalising' deviant perspectives merely with the act of engaging in debate (which has some merit, but is applied too generally), which would likely condemn many more. There's no way that can end without people with legitimate points being terrified of speaking.
I can't tell if it's ignorance or cynicism at work here.
Let me fix your summaries:
> In which he downplays racial bias in police shootings
In which a guest on Hsu's podcast, psychologist Joe Cesario, presents in detail his research, some of which is experimental, demonstrating no racial bias in police shootings (not the case in police interactions in general though).
> In which he says lack of segregation is the reason for racial underperformance
In which a guest on Hsu's podcast, Claude Steele, a[n African American] social psychologist, discusses his research in detail and his [African American] co-host, Corey Washington, discusses his daughter's educational experience. (And in which no one suggests that racial segregation in education would be desirable.)
> Interview with an open white supremacist
Interview with a YouTube personality who's also had Noam Chomsky and Peter Boghossian on his show, e.g.:
It's not. It's purely media manipulation over the past few years that has some people conditioned to reflexively associate "eugenic" with creeping Nazism.
I recall when LessWrong and Yudkowsky was covered by NYT. They came off as looking like a bunch of hyper-rationalist kooks, a bit New Age and cult-like even, but otherwise harmless. The same will likely happen to Alexander.
But there have been one or two notable personnel changes at the NYT since that piece on the rationalists, and we're in the midst of a moral panic / cancellation frenzy.
I mean, the NYT tackled the tradcath subculture recently and it was sympathetic, even laudatory. [0] I think the NYT treats these subcultures as more curios than targets for cancellation. Not to mention, post-2016 election, they’ve even caught flack for being too sympathetic towards reactionary individuals or groups, even those who are outright hateful. [1]
> Hsu’s beliefs in innate biological differences between human populations, especially regarding intelligence --an unscientific position which makes him unsuited to direct a research institution’s funding or its graduate studies
I can see why this belief is controversial and in an ideal world I wish everyone was born exactly the same. However I don't think applying strong scientific research and methods to try and answer this hypothesis is necessarily wrong. Unless it has already been proven otherwise in which case I am unaware of the research.
In pretty much every study within group differences are far and away more massive that between group differences. Unlike other things like height, eye colour, or facial hair growth, intelligence is highly variable even between identical twins. The genetic link seems weak at best.
It’s also more or less impossible to study with great accuracy - you’re trying to study how race affects intelligence, but how do you correct for non-biological factors? Race is deeply intertwined with economics, education, nutrition, healthcare, and every other aspect of society and culture. Any study you do, regardless of results, will have a mountain or potentially over corrected or under corrected factors.
Finally, what are we even studying? Defining intelligence is a nightmare, and a quick glance at history shows how the definition of intelligence has changed over time and between cultures. Trying to look at how race’s biological factors affect intelligence irrespective of sociological factors is in many ways a fool’s errand - the very definition of intelligence is wrapped right up in those sociological factors!
That's a terrible argument that's often used to deflect from its crux. Of course within group differences are larger than racial differences. You're comparing a single (admittedly aggregated) factor to the sum total of human variation. That it has a lowered effect isn't surprising.
Furthermore, the paper you cite doesn't even deny that different groups test consistently differently. Furthermore, it also explicitly states studies of test bias have consistently shown negatives.
I also strongly oppose the conflation of population level metrics with individual level metrics.
It's better to just let the advertisers and political manipulators gather the same data and do essentially the same research, but in secret and for their own aims, and benefit from the resulting understaning, than for the research, and it's possibly unpleasant resulting knowledge, be in public and used to defend against those who would otherwise get to capitalize on it, at the expense of the very people you presumably would like to protect from abuse?
Ignorance is never the correct answer no matter how unpleasant some bit of knowledge is.
Whether the answers come back in your favor or not, having the answer is better than not having the answer, or worse, only some people having the answer and not everyone else.
This guy might indeed harbor odious intentions, but some of these arguments are not holding water on their own.
> In pretty much every study within group differences are far and away more massive that between group differences.
You are perpetuating what’s known as Lewontin’s fallacy.
This claim is extremely narrowly true: clustering on a 1-dimensional fixation index is insufficient to reliably mechanically classify race. If you don’t know what that means, stop trying to use this claim in your arguments.
Here’s what it doesn’t mean: it doesn’t mean that there aren’t significant population-level phenotypic differences between ethnic groups. These differences can include intelligence (and 30 years of twin studies suggests they probably do).
> Here’s what it doesn’t mean: it doesn’t mean that there aren’t significant population-level phenotypic differences between ethnic group
But it does mean that we don't have any evidence for this claim.
> (and 30 years of twin studies suggests they probably do).
This would be a great place for a citation. I'm wondering how a twin study is going to show the effects of genetics on intelligence. As GP suggests, twin studies show differences in intelligence between even identical twins raised in the same household, so Amy conclusions from whatever study you're referencing would need to show statistically significant variation controlling for the noise.
If you actually care, just google it. There are dozens of great large-n metastudies. Chances are you don’t care (mostly based on the fact that you clearly haven’t googled it already), so I have to be jealous of my time - sorry.
> would need to show statistically significant variation controlling for the noise.
Obviously g-factor researchers have thought of this. Current best estimates place 60-80% of human intelligence variance as being genetically heritable.
I've been able to find evidence that disagrees with you, but not evidence that agrees with you. Since you've made very specific claims that most contrary evidence is invalid because it is not multvariate.
It would have taken you less time to post a single link than to write your response, so I don't buy the time excuse.
> Obviously g-factor researchers have thought of this. Current best estimates place 60-80%
I'm aware. You claimed that twin studies (which control for race by comparing between people of the same race and are usually limited to small sample sizes) have revealed racial ethnic differences in g controlling for the environmental factors.
This claim is questionable on its face. Your heritability claim is much less contentious, but heritability of g and race correlation of g, controlling for environmental factors, are very different claims.
Adult intelligence is ~80% heritable. There is >1stddev difference in mean intelligence between many ethnic groups. (Do you need me to provide a citation for this as well, or can you google it this time?) Do the math. What should your bayes factor be on this being environmental?
You can also find studies that specifically try to find environmental causal factors on intelligence - the effect sizes for identifiable factors (like poverty, or other common scapegoats) are laughably small. Once again, feel free to google this.
I’m sorry if I come across as hostile by asking you to look things up, but usually when people demand citations for things that A) they should already know if they’re debating about this and B) are easy to find, I have to assume they’re trying to waste my time and/or arguing from bad faith.
I never asked you to cite intelligence heritability. Like I said, I agree that intelligence is at least partially heritable.
I asked specifically for you to justify the original claim, that there are phenotypic differences between ethnic groups that include intelligence, as supported by twin studies. That's a very specific and as far as I know very unfounded claim.
As I explained - look at the percent of variance that’s heritable. Now look at the measured difference in population intelligence. Now tell me - what’s the probability of that being environmental, based on the fraction of intelligence variability that can’t be attributed to genetics? A fermi estimate is fine - you’ll end up close to zero anyway. You shouldn’t need a document to spell this out for you in excruciating detail.
Rushton is perhaps not the person you want to cite if you want to disassociate yourself from scientific racism.
And that paper, which I'm familiar with, doesn't address many of the modern criticisms of such theories that are based on the idea of "g" being socially constructed/influenced in the first place. (nor does it actually do much, if anything, to support the original claim you made: not all of their conclusions are phenotypic in nature, at a minimum, sections 3, 7, 8, 9, and 11 can be explained culturally despite what the paper says).
I'd suggest "Reconciling IQ Gains and Heritability", or "Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called “X”-factors", which notes as a semi-conclusion that we know of environmental factors that have clear and demonstrable causal effect on IQ. We know of no specific genes that have this effect. So concluding that a bunch of individual genes have small effects is actually less supported than the similar claim that a bunch of individual societal/environmental factors have impact. Both of these are more recent than the paper you cite, and could be seen as academic responses to perceived flaws.
> So concluding that a bunch of individual genes have small effects is actually less supported than the similar claim that a bunch of individual societal/environmental factors have impact.
What an absurd claim! This is specifically the hypothesis that the last several decades of twin studies is designed to test. You are either ignorant of this body of research or you are being disingenuous. We can distinguish between these two cases because adopted twins and siblings have highly correlated genetic factors and weakly correlated environmental factors.
I notice that you keep avoiding the absurd improbability of environmental factors mediating bulk racial differences given the magnitude of population-level differences and the relatively small fraction of variance attributable to environment - but you seem desperate not to acknowledge the latter.
> We can distinguish between these two cases because adopted twins and siblings have highly correlated genetic factors and weakly correlated environmental factors.
We can't, and the papers I cite give a highly coherent explanation for this, a phenomena called cultural filtering.
Like I said, I suggest you go and actually read recent papers instead of relying on a survey paper from fifteen years ago that relies on actual research older than many of the professors publishing this stuff today.
It's not worth having this conversation is you're unrolling to engage with modern research, and it'll just devolve into an ideological flamewar, which dang prefers us not to have. So again please read some modern research. Or don't, but don't claim this stuff is settled when your are a decade out of date.
I looked at the things you "cited" (i.e. name dropped without linking).
"Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called “X”-factors":
A) no non-paywalled sources, so I'm suspicious if you even read it
B) written by a philosophy professor, not a scientist, with no scientific background
C) the argument of this paper, as far as I can tell from the abstract, is "the pure-environmental hypothesis is nonfalsifiable", i.e. completely useless
I would critique it more if I could actually read it.
"Reconciling IQ Gains and Heritability" - this isn't actually a paper, it's just a section in some article. Where did you even find this? It barely shows up on the internet - your comment is the third result. In any case, it A) doesn't seem to support your claim, and B) doesn't strike me as especially compelling research - they're just summarizing some thoughts about the Flynn effect.
This further increases my confidence that you are arguing in bad faith.
> the papers I cite give a highly coherent explanation for this, a phenomena called cultural filtering.
I can't find this term anywhere in these papers (or elsewhere).
> no non-paywalled sources, so I'm suspicious if you even read it
I have access to many paywalled articles.
> "Reconciling IQ Gains and Heritability" - this isn't actually a paper, it's just a section in some article.
Ah you're right, I meant to cite that section of the larger article, but the wider article is rather well cited.
> phenomena called cultural filtering
tl;dr: The idea is that culture magnifies any underlying genetics. The example given is two siblings/twins separated at birth, both are taller than average. As a result, they both end up playing basketball and being better than average as children, and as a result attend basketball camps. They both get good training and end up as college basketball players.
The question is to what extent culture serves to magnify any underlying differences. And whether different culture(s) can magnify these differences in different ways.
> The question is to what extent culture serves to magnify any underlying differences.
This sounds like irrelevant bikeshedding between genotypes and phenotypes. It also doesn't have any bearing against my claims, c.f. my original comment about "significant population-level phenotypic differences between ethnic groups".
> This sounds like irrelevant bikeshedding between genotypes and phenotypes. It also doesn't have any bearing against my claims, c.f. my original comment about "significant population-level phenotypic differences between ethnic groups".
Of course it does: if the only concrete support for phenotypic differences is based on twin data (or similar), and that data is subject to magnification due to cultural factors, the underlying phenotypic impact is smaller.
That's not what "phenotypic" means. Phenotypic environment includes any "cultural amplification" or similar factors. Almost all genetic competitions are subject to some sort of king effect, e.g. hypergamy and concomitant GMV in non-monogamous species. We still consider the results of these effects to be phenotypic.
Ok then I'm really unclear what you're point is. Yes, there are observable performance differences that align across observable ethnic boundaries.
No one in this thread questioned this (keep in mind stereotype threat is a phenotypic difference). If that's the only claim you're making, I'm not sure why you felt the need to cite Rushton of all people, who was specifically arguing that these differences were genotypic in nature.
I posted multiple clear, specific, and falsifiable claims. Feel free to address them. Or you can keep posting snarky quips completely devoid of concrete information - up to you.
You can label (factual) statements with whatever emotionally connoted phrase you want; it has no bearing on whether they’re correct.
I notice that people much more often twist themselves into knots to make comments like yours when it's black people being talked about, but the idea of Ashkenazi Jews being up to a standard deviation smarter [1] is much less controversial. It's still controversial, but it's nowhere near the nuclear topic that black-v-white intelligence is.
I don't think it would be an ideal if everyone were born exactly the same. Seems like a lot of beauty in the world around us comes from our different faces, thoughts, beliefs, culture, etc, all born of how we're all different.
Throwaway because with headlines like this, you can't be too careful. It's getting scary seeing people keeping quiet in predominantly progressive sectors like media, academia, and tech, out of fear that what they say today will get them fired tomorrow, fear that something they say will draw attention to something from five years ago, or that something they say today will cost them in five years.
There's a class of under-researched things that we know too little about, but for political reasons, no one can research. Anything around genetic traits of races, differences between men and women, research around causes of LGBT orientations and identities that could lead to preventing people from being LGBT.
These aren't even the ethically hard ones like genetic modifications in humans. These are just political suicide.
"It is not within the power of practitioners of demonstrative sciences to change opinion at will, chooing now this and now that one; there is a great difference between giving orders to a mathematician or a philosopher and given them to a merchant or a lawyer; as demonstrated conclusions about natural and celestial phenomena cannot be changed with the same ease as opinions about what is or is not legitimate in a contract, in a rental, or in commerce." -Galileo
1. He wasn't forced to resign. He was requested to resign by the president of MSU.
2. He's still a tenured professor, and he will be returning to that role.
3. The group trying to oust him is the GEU (Graduate Employees Union, affiliated with the AFL-CIO), which represents 1200 graduate assistants at the University.
Apparently Dr. Hsu has made some controversial statements about genetics. The GEU's accusations appear to be about perceived racism.
One of Dr. Hsu's sins was appearing on a program with Stephane Molyneux, a conservative commentator whom they call "a white supremacist". I've watched several of Molyneux's programs and he is hardly a racist. Conservative and white, yes. I guess that's bad enough these days.
> I've watched several of Molyneux's programs and he is hardly a racist. Conservative and white, yes.
From his Wikipedia page:
Stefan Basil Molyneux (/stəˈfæn ˈmɒlɪnjuː/; born September 24, 1966) is a Canadian far-right, white nationalist[2] podcaster and YouTuber who is known for his promotion of scientific racism and white supremacist views.
Molyneux is described as a leading figure of the alt-right movement by Politico and The Washington Post, and as a far-right activist.[8][9][10][11] Tom Clements in The Independent described Molyneux as having "a perverse fixation on race and IQ".[12]
The Freedomain internet community which Molyneux leads has been described as a cult, and Molyneux has been described as a cult leader, using cult indoctrination techniques on his followers.
Right. Just as one should ask themselves whether each assertion written in Molyneux's wikipedia page is rhetoric, opinions, or facts, so too with that tweet.
This is my point: almost no one really cares what is true or not, including acknowledging the shades of grey that exist everywhere in the complexity of reality. It's simply how the human mind works.
There are an incredible number of people on HN and in Silicon Valley who clearly believe that black people are on average genetically inferior to whites and Asians and also think they're being incredibly clever when they tap-dance around that core belief. Maybe now some of them will at least do the rest of us the courtesy of saying it outright.
> One of the video clips is taken from an interview I did with YouTuber Stefan Molyneux in 2017. Molyneux was not a controversial figure in 2017, although he has since become one.
I’m going with he is in way over his head, and didn’t know who this guy was who interviewed him, or is lying. 10 minutes of research in 2017 easily would have shown this.
I am very glad this happened and this decision was very supported by the faculty of MSU. He is still a full professor at MSU making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. He’s just no longer in charge of the research agenda. His own research on quantitative genetics is terrible and widely ridiculed. It’s great that he’s tenured and is allowed to have his poor scholarship justify his racist and sexist conclusions; but it doesn’t mean he gets to automatically lead a research agenda for a whole university.
He raises a good point that appearing on a podcast is a red herring. Suppose he actually just discussed say physics on the podcast? It would be more a question of what he said. Or, if he just said, "whoops, I had no idea who this guy was". Who he chooses to host on his own podcast is a different story.
People keep assuming that asking the question "what relationship (if any) is there between race and intelligence from a biological standpoint?" is the racist part. The question by itself isn't really the problem.
The racist part is pretending that it's still an open question. It isn't. There is no measurable biological relationship between race and intelligence.
There has been a massive amount of research into what influences "intelligence", and the sum of it makes it clear that environmental factors easily have a significant enough effect to explain differences in scores between racial groups on different metrics.
Someone might bring up the fact that often even when controlling for factors like education and family income, the racial gap narrows but might not disappear completely. The response is that it is fundamentally impossible to fully control for the effect of race on the environment someone grows up in. Even when absolutely every other factor is identical, a white person and a black person are not going to have the same environment because their race constantly affects how the rest of the world interacts with them.
Essentially: We know environmental factors can affect any given metric of intelligence on a magnitude consistent with racial performance gaps on those metrics. Proof of this can be found in things like the fact that average IQ scores have increased over time, and the average IQ of black people in the 1990s was equivalent to the average white IQ in the 1940s. Biology does not change in 50 years so the improvement must be entirely from changes in environmental factors.
In addition, race itself intrinsically has a significant effect on one's environment. Those two facts alone are enough to make it clear that any hypothetical biological component is too insignificant to be measured.
For those who are unaware or operate under certain assumptions of how Universities work, they tend to be highly politically charged places, and the value of "the brand" is more important than any individual. Regardless of what you think of Steve Hsu's statement ( measured vs tone-deaf, informed vs ignorant/racist), the mistake he made was taking a position to begin with. I was a the University where Trump went to undergrad when he was running for election, Not a single faculty/staff made comment about it because there was a directive from top down to say nothing. This is just how it is.
Exact same playbook used to try to discredit Jordan Peterson, except he told them to shove it and fought back against the mob in public space with a megaphone, while the crowd was hurling insults and jeering at him.
I know HN has a bit of an issue with JBP, but look at the this here yet again and think for yourselves.
So if you believe something to be a fact and supported by scientific research, and that fact is offensive to someone or a group if people, then you can be “cancelled”? American academia is in trouble.
Do you mean the hundreds of faculty at his university and the grad student union that called for his resignation from a position of power over them? Yeah, I think it’s reasonable. He’s still payed quite well and welcome to his crappy research ideas.
His genetics ideas are bad science. They are poorly thought out papers and overstate conclusions based on data that don’t properly account for the population and environmental effects. Hsu has been doing this for many many years. Then he goes around alt-right circles and acts like there is controversy; and starts companies offering embryo selection based on polygenic scores; again terrible science and he didn’t even state his conflict of interests on that. I disagree with all of those ideas and actions... and he still should be a professor. He just shouldn’t be a VP of research at MSU. He’s had several bad ethical lapses. The COI alone is grounds for firing... see the similar types of controversies surrounding the Harvard chemist who failed to disclose Chinese funding; that guy wasn’t even vp of research. Finally, all of this controversy makes it nearly impossible to do the work of vp of research effectively. He gets to go back now to maybe making his research and papers better (in a fully tenured job).
Anyone in such a senior position either understands this is just part of the deal going in+, or is demonstrating their unfitness to be in such a position by failing to understand something like that.
+ That you are now more visible and you don't have the luxury of anonymity any more, and that this is just an inherent part of the bargain in taking on more responsibility, that now every little thing you say will be held against you by someone somewhere, and that now that you are part of the public face of your larger organization, it may at any time decide your affect on it's image is more important than any other thing about you.
It's not that you can't still hold positions, it's just that you can't still hold them for free.
People really get their backs up about someone having to step down from a position of great power to a position of somewhat less, but still considerable, power. I suspect it speaks to people's feeling that there may be things they can't achieve if they don't behave or present a certain way.
But even if there was an injustice here, there are far greater injustices in the world, done to people who don't wield any power, who are just trying to get by. People who are denied even a modicum of self-determination, let alone power.
The Larry Nassar case exposed major cultural issues within the MSU administration. Is this treatment of Steve Hsu the pendulum swinging in the extreme opposite direction, or out of control woke-ism?
I think ultimately a university cares about its image more than anything. Nuking a tenured professor from a VP position is small potatoes for better optics (no matter the merit of allegations). I think the allegations do have merit at least for someone in an administrative position, not a purely academic one.
We're likely to see a certain reorientation of academia. The old business model was inherently unsustainable and even if it looks like it's under assault by the culture war it's probably a more systemic issue.
The Visigoths didn't bring down Rome. By the time they were on the scene Rome was a house of cards.
I predict that what will happen as a result of this type of activity is:
At some point an organised advanced threat, or a disorganised mob, will attempt to take down a truly bad individual or group, who will retaliate in a truly disastrous way.
Of course, this is inevitable given enough time.
My concern now is that we are on a collision course with history, we can see that, and we appear to have no idea how to course-correct.
"I've always said that I'm agnostic on whether... so there are observed test score differences between groups, I think that's clear, you can't deny that.
The causality of that, whether it's partially due to genetics, I've always been agnostic on. Not because I think it's impossible, but because it's such a charged thing we should really make sure the science is solid before we speculate. We shouldn't randomly speculate on something that sensitive.
But even just not being willing to categorically rule out that God could have created us with average group differences has gotten me into trouble. And I think that's just absurd. So for someone to attack me for saying 'We don't know the answer to this question, let's do the science first and then talk about it.' Even that position is actually not tenable in the current social justice warrior political climate."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=58&v=XHUSl9FLAmE...
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/06/twitter-attacks-and-de...