170 karma · joined June 18, 2020
No. Actual geneticists are still pretty skeptical about GWASes because they tell us almost nothing about, well, the genetics behind complex traits. It's all good and well running GWASes for literally anything (see: twitter.com/sbotgwa or that dude who got a pretty good PGS from correlating a country's GDP with the genotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana available in that country) but that's virtually useless for serious research or if you want to know how genes work.
Actually figuring out to what extent a trait is genetically determined usually involves much more complex methods (e.g. mendelian randomization) and knock-out experiments on animal models, which is all terribly expensive and tedious. But that's how actual genetics works, not waving a magic wand of +15% heritability.
There is no single definition of species. People who study bacteria have their own, so do people who study plants, birds, insects, and so on. Sure, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens, who coexisted and interbred in the same ecosystems, are different species. Whatever that means.
>Are we supposed to believe it was a big egalitarian paradise?
Lol what does that have to do with what I said?
SneerClub was always ever about venting about rationalists when the dumb speculation about evopsych and the IQ of black people went out of hand, and people who have attempted to doxx Scott on there have been banned. (Doxxing people at all is against the rules of reddit anyway.) Yes, it's a circlejerk subreddit, yes it's petty etc. But it's not the evil den of terrorists rationalists think it is.
This is wrong. Recent analyses (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30059-3) have shown Neanderthals have also contributed to Sub-Saharan DNA. Maybe the authors weren't aware of the latest findings at the time of writing and no one ever thought of correcting that part.
Okay so what's with the obsession with a niche subreddit whose sole purpose is to dunk on rationalists/SSCers who talk too often about the IQ of black people. I mean it's not like Aaronson is himself an HBD blogger. I kind of like Aaronson but his online anxiety is really getting the better of his judgement.
That, and of course he also wrote a take-down of IQ (and psychology in general) that pissed off a lot of IQ-fetishists on here.
He also made a bunch of money, knows a lot of advanced and ultrarigorous (read: French-educated) math and reads in a bunch of languages so even though he's a colossal asshole no one can exactly dismiss him as a hack, so he just kind of sticks there like an annoying wart in the face of "the discourse" that just won't go away. Personally, and in case it wasn't obvious, I sort of like him.
Edit: I forgot to mention he sometimes blocks people who give the wrong answer to the integral solving problems he posts on Twitter. I don't expect you to understand but I really respect that.
Now you guys probably know the XY problem (asking the wrong question X to when you really want to solve the problem Y). The YX problem, on the other hand, goes like this:
User: "Hi, how do I do Y?"
SO: "Why do you want to do Y?"
User: "Because I want to do [use case]"
SO: "Are you sure you don't want to do X instead?"
User: "No I don't, I have this constraint and this use case so I'm pretty sure this isn't about X and I really want to do Y."
SO: "Are you sure this isn't a duplicate of [some question involving X]?"
User: "No it's not, the question while similar doesn't have the same constraint or usecase and I have searched SO for a while for questions that specifically involved these and didn't find any so I really need to do Y."
SO: "Wow, I can't possibly imagine why you, for a use case you've examined for a while and which I have been made aware of five minutes ago, could possibly want to do Y while not doing X. I don't know and I rest my case. A solution to Y probably doesn't exist anyway."
Answerer: "Hi to do Y you have to do this [hacky snippet]" (answer accepted)
User: "Cool, thanks!"
SO: "This is bad practice and I don't condone it. It shouldn't be upvoted or the accepted answer."
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Of course this is the optimistic scenario, where the question does get eventually answered.
On the other hand, forbidding a thing altogether seems to have disastrously ineffective results too (see: the prohibition, war on drugs, etc.).
Maybe a better solution is to simply forbid companies from putting addictive things in their products to sell them, but keep the addictive thing legal, e.g. don't put too much sugar in the soda you make (so people won't expect too much sugar as a matter of course) but let people add sugar to the soda if they really want to. In other words, regulate companies' practices but not individuals'.
Now just because we have a bunch of pure-bred homozygous mice doesn't mean mice behave the same way as humans with respect to e.g. metabolic pathways, immune system etc. It's just that we often don't have better models.