That post cements that you do not understand the fundamentals of the scientific method or how we do scientific analysis. E.g. that we assume "that "equality" between environments exists"
You're very confused about how a lot of things work on fairly fundamental levels which would take hours to disentangle, so all I can do is recommend learning more on philosophy of science and read some more papers on heritability. Maybe this one picked not entirely at random: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Holland-2/publica...
I am presently researching a PhD in the philosophy of science and causal analysis; I have two degrees in physics, and I have spend the last nearly 10 years with major lead researchers and data scientists across many industries.
My opinions here are a summary of a talk I recently delivered at a conference on issues applying "ordinary statistical methods" to complex systems, esp. those with profound hysteresis, such as people. But likewise, my opinions arent rare amongst people with similar experience to me: psychmetrics, psychology, heritability research, and so on -- are widely regarded amongst my peers as pseudoscience.
Very refreshing to see someone actually providing a link for further reading. This raises the level of discourse on HN.
His argument as I understand it, is that the MZ twins have a different environment in ways such as being treated as more similar by their parents. This means that high similarity in one respect (such as appearance or temperament) can contaminate the natural experiment by making people assume they are more similar in another respect (such as intelligence or learning style) and treating them the same where that second trait is relevant, thus making the second trait more highly correlated than they would be by genes alone (e.g. you assume they're equally intelligent and thus give them the same education).
This has some merit but is quite far from a knock-down argument.
My previous talks with a professor studying genetics in Oxford has given me the impression that heritability is settled science and theres a huge volume of papers in the area, so I'm not going to change my mind based on an anonymous comment and a paper by a non-academic with an axe to grind without first going back and consulting with her.
Given your statements here I am quite confused as to how you can have a degree in physics while dismissing science where you can't make interventions... did you study astronomy at all in your degree?
I'm also confused as to how you state that genes do not cause intelligence, do you think a mouse is less intelligent than a human due to its lack of soul or something?
I dont have that high an opinion of astronomy, but my issue is what counts as an explanation (a model with causal variables), and what counts as an experiment (setting the value, etc.) -- astronomy can often pass these tests on the underlying models.. and are usually good at reporting the confidence intervals as a appropriate.
My issue with something like a human being is that the state space is going to be non-linear, in the sense that suppose we have an explanatory model of the human in their environment, state = h(x_env, x_body, t, ...)
This makes controlling, really in any sense, those variables is going to be nearly impossible. So close values in `x` space, eg., two environments that look nearly-identical, are going to have radically different values in state space.
Psychologists, using linear "mereological intuitions" based on classical physics, will deny this. A physicist however, would not make this mistake. In cases of hysteresis and complexity, we're well-aware tiny variations in an environment can produce radically different paths thru' state space.
(And I think people are more complex than magnets!).
The fundamental issue with the field of studying human behaviour with scientific methods, is that (imv), we dont have scientific methods. We shouldn't expect science to provide us a method which works in every env.
I have, perhaps, high standards on what counts as science; it's esteem imv comes from disciplines that can meet those standards. Everyone else is rent-seeking.
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Edit:
> genes do not cause intelligence
If there's an infinite number of possible people P, our genes make a subset of those impossible because they're not "biologically possible".
There is a narrow sense of "cause" which therefore says that genes play a causal role.
I was taking a more robust sense, in which (one plausible view), is that the set of effects we call "intelligence" are gounded in the body, but a cause of the environment.
Splitting these issues out is very subtle however.
One simple way of making this clear: most possible bodies arent intelligent; they dont speak; they dont think; etc. And all those are biologically possible.
Just as genes dont cause English speaking, they dont "obviously" cause intelligence. Most biologically possible people are basically unable to think, never having been developed in a social environment.
Very cool! Reminds me of the Thompson compiler hack.
Not only they tell us genetics doesn't exist, but we can't say it's shitty science because they're the ones telling us what's shitty science and what's not! Brilliant!
You're very confused about how a lot of things work on fairly fundamental levels which would take hours to disentangle, so all I can do is recommend learning more on philosophy of science and read some more papers on heritability. Maybe this one picked not entirely at random: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Holland-2/publica...