in my head you're one of the main posters on here who's complained about the way many rationalists are race-science-sympathetic; do you have any recommendations for places to read the factual arguments against its veracity? (not going to try to debate you or anything, feel free to turn replies/reblogs off)
https://bactra.org/weblog/523.html - the idea of a general factor of intelligence is not supported by factor analysis (i know a lot of people believe in g, and i don't think you have to disclaim g to not be a race realist, but i find this argument persuasive)
https://bactra.org/weblog/520.html - on abuse of heritability in general as a concept
https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not-exist - twin studies (foundational to many aspects of hereditarian discussions of iq heritability) are basically all bunk
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-intelligence-is-not-like-height - direct heritability of educational attainment is about 4%, radically lower than height; GWAS results for cognitive traits are heavily confounded in ways height isn't
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/how-population-stratification-led - earlier findings about polygenetic selection on height turned out to be artifacts of population stratification, and this problem is much worse for cognitive traits
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/where-are-the-recent-selective-sweeps - evidence for recent selection effects on complex behavioral traits is essentially zilch
gusevlab.org/projects/hsq - see chapter 5 in particular, re: heritability of educational attainment, how polygenetic indices for educational attainment are hopelessly confounded, how heritability varies with socioeconomic status, adoption studies, claim polygenetic scores reflect selection effects; also chapter 6 on IQ, chapter 9 on whether race maps onto genetic variation in the way hereditarians claim
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.24216 - no evidence for divergent selection on cognitive traits between african and european populations; maximum genetic contributon to iq gap is around 12-23% under unrealistically generous assumptions
https://kevinabird.github.io/2021/02/12/still-no-support.html - reply to some criticisms on the previous paper
https://kevinabird.github.io/2023/12/30/No-Case-For-Race-Realism.html - addresses bo winegard's "case for race realism," a continuously recycled argument that relies on bad math and badly separated confounders (among other issues)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289625000704 - re: institutional connections of hereditarian research to far-right political movements
https://gcbias.org/2018/03/14/polygenic-scores-and-tea-drinking/ - why it's tricky to use polygenetic scores to make claims about between-population differences
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.00892 - essentially a more formal version of the above
https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2019/1/26/5262222?login=false - why between-population polygenetic scores don't mean what hereditarians say they mean
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/harden/files/2018/10/Charles-Murray-is-once-again-peddling-junk-science-about-race-and-IQ-Vox.pdf - sort of a general "why charles murray is full of shit" piece
the hereditarian position was straightforward: that as molecular genetics matured, we would find that polygenetic scores for cognitive traits show large directionally consistent differences between racial groups that reflect genetic causation. this prediction has failed at every level it has been tested. the headline numbers for heritability of IQ come from twin studies (see Bessis, above) and population-level GWAS, both of which are hopelessly confounded. when you use within-family designs, the heritability of educational attainment falls to an extraordinarily low number. for IQ specifically, the direct estimates are also dramatically lower than the population estimates. the signal, in short, disappears.
there is no evidence of divergent selection on cognitive traits. the hereditarian arguments that high intra-group heritability implies genetic group differences, and that correlations between european ancestry proportion and iq in admixed populations demonstrate genetic causation have both been thoroughly dismantled. there is just no empirical leg left for the hereditarians to stand on. it's not that the question is unanswerable or too sensitive to study, it's that the data is in and the hereditarians are just wrong.