Thread by @lymanstoneky

Just want to flag an obvious error (there are many non-obvious per usual for his posts) in this post from @cremieuxrecueil : controlling for education of adoptive parents isn't enough because adoptive parents are either self-selected *or* screened. cremieux.xyz/p/brief-data-p…

Put another way, the prevalence of any trait X is different among adoptive parents of educational level Y because adoptive parents are either (1) married to one bio parent or (2) screened by an agency as a suitable home for the unrelated child

Thus, controlling for educational status, variation in home environment is likely to be compressed among adoptive parents. We can see this in ACS where adoptive kids report less variation in HH income or parental marital status by household head educational attainment.

I dunno who @cremieuxrecueil is IRL, somebody said he was this person, in general "long tedious medium post arguing that actually functional life outcomes are just a product of genetics i.e. race" is not something I respond to on the basis of on-its-face dumbness.

But here I felt it worth noting simply because he cites so many adoption studies in the same wrong way.

Folks, if you think parental quality doesn't matter, go try to test the IQs of children murdered by their parents.

"Yes but what we mean is once you drop all the variation, the remaining variation doesn't explain much."

*rolls eyes*

Sorry, someone said it was this person, which fits topically and thematically, but idk scholar.google.com/citations?user…

Your regular reminder that genetics explain 20-80% of intelligence and intelligence explains 10-60% of income variance (range from various studies exploring this) so genetics explain between 2 and 48% of income variance, meaning most income variance is in fact not genetic.

(and also twin studies aren't a valid design in general)

or rather, their design isn't telling you even approximately what you might think. see here for an in-depth example:

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1665811136346816512?s=20

What's very irritating in all this is you've got a lot of people, broadly on the left, who simply cannot stomach the idea that intelligence might have some real measurable content which causes different life outcomes, and that this might be partly genetic...

... and then people like this broadly on something like "the right" who then want to argue that basically your entire life was decided in your genes and by genes we basically mean your racial phenotype.

When the credible and boring argument "genes have some meaningful influence, we don't know exactly how much, but also other stuff matters a lot too, and race accounts for only a quite small part of intelligence-relevant genetic variance" is just ignored

Like all the debate about "racial differences in intelligence" elides the fact that within-race variance in intelligence is *orders of magnitude* larger than differences predicted by racial phenotype. Even if there is a racial difference, it's trivial next to other variables.

Like if you take % of variance in IQ relevant genes predicted by race X % of IQ explained by those genes X % of income (or other life outcome) explained by IQ, your race component of that outcome is gonna be small even if individual shares are decently sized estimates

@cremieuxrecueil If you won't even do your interlocutors the common courtesy of introducing yourself, why should we assume you have any good faith at any stage of the discussion at all?