Undark is stupid

Reviewing a new anti-HBD hit piece

A new article dropped today called In Genetics, a Tense Coexistence of Mainstream and Fringe Views. It’s a hit piece and it’s filled with dumb statements.

In an era of open data, genome-wide association studies have become entangled with efforts to prove Black inferiority.

It’s about black IQ, not inferiority. Inferiority is a scare word.

At the time of the 2022 conference, “this guy [Kirkegaard] was having a bad influence with the crap he was spreading, and the way he behaved online, and he was giving our scientific field a bad name,” recalled Abdellaoui, a geneticist working in the Department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam University Medical Center whose research interests include the genetics of intelligence. Abdellaoui noted in a post on Medium that Kirkegaard had never been part of any credible research program or Ph.D. program, and had a reputation for publishing sloppy scientific work in dubious journals. “I just didn’t want to be associated with that, and I wanted to have that be clear — that he’s not on my team and I’m not on his.” (Kirkegaard did not respond to multiple email requests for an interview for this story.)

First, PhD programs don’t matter. Emil Kirkegaard is an expert in the field he studies. He’s published more research than a lot of tenured academics. So who cares about a PhD? He didn’t need one. Credentialist gatekeeping is wrong and anti-science. We see that here on display — it’s all about keeping out people with new and better ideas.

Second, look how they lie about “being badly behaved online.” All that means is Emil Kirkegaard is pushing scientific hypotheses they disagree with. These types are always doing this — back when I used to post on rationalist forums they would pretend to be free speech but would harass me claiming I was being “uncharitable” to other users, for example when I would ask them for evidence of blank slatism. No hereditarians seem to be badly behaved enough to get banned from unbiased platforms like X or Substack, so this is just fibbing. It’s only leftists who see the “bad behavior” which is really just not agreeing with them. But they want to pretend to be free speech to centrists and low information center rightists.

Shortly after Abdellaoui announced his withdrawal, he learned that Kirkegaard was scratched from the speaker lineup, and Abdellaoui decided to give the keynote after all. Yet just two years later, Kirkegaard would be back at the ISIR conference podium — a podium that has served as a platform for Kirkegaard and other proponents of the hereditarian hypothesis since long before Abdellaoui’s threatened boycott. Their presence at ISIR, alongside psychologists and geneticists from many of the world’s top research institutions, underscores a complicated reality in this fraught field of study: When it comes to the genetics of intelligence, the line between mainstream and fringe can be hard to pin down, and the work of the former can intertwine with that of the latter in ways that are difficult to disentangle.

The actual bad, bullying behavior comes from the leftists as usually. This guy tried to get Emil Kirkegaard canceled.

Also notice the use of the gatekeeping word “fringe.” What kind of low mind concerns itself with the distinction between mainstream and fringe, as opposed to true and false?

Genetics researchers are, by and large, dubious of efforts to demonstrate a genetic basis for racial or ancestral-group differences in intelligence. The current tools of genetics, they say, simply aren’t equipped to explain which, if any, portions of observed group differences in complex human traits are attributable to the effects of genes, rather than environmental, cultural, or social factors.

This consensus is false, as Rindermann 2020 shows. Plenty of people with the gatekept credentials actually think race IQ differences are genetic.

“rather than environmental, cultural, or social factors.” What does cultural even mean here? This is just the lazy rattling off of empty excuses to deny genetics.

It is possible, the authors warned in 2023, that efforts to discern group differences in genetic propensities for traits like intelligence could one day gain scientific legitimacy. Although they disagreed on the likelihood of that scenario, they agreed that the social costs, were it to come to pass, could be vast — all the more so if findings happened to align with existing stereotypes against minoritized groups.

It’s already 100% certain that blacks have lower IQ PGSs than whites. We didn’t even need molecular methods to infer this — Jensen demonstrated it in the 1970s. Rather, I guess they’re talking about the public increasingly realizing this as the evidence becomes simplified.

Source

We already got this chart in 2019. The slatists had a couple of problems with it, namely they claimed population stratefication could mean genetic effects reflect gene environment correlations rather than causal effects. But this fails to properly weight the non-molecular evidence of the last century.

Should scientists working on topics with far-reaching social implications have to show that the benefits of their work justify the societal risks? Or is the valid, scientific pursuit of knowledge justification enough? And either way, should scientists curb their own research if they know that others may abuse it?

Such loaded language, specifically “abuse” and “societal risks.” What is “society” anyway? How can truth create “risks” for it? Whatever it is, it sounds like a den of liars, considering they fear the light!

Aggggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!! Noooooooooo!!!!!!!! They found out black people’s polygenic scores for IQ!!!!!!!!!

Almost universally, experts in psychology, genetics, and related fields have discredited efforts by Kirkegaard and others to use polygenic scores to demonstrate the hereditarian hypothesis, describing them as deeply flawed.

This is a lie, it’s never been discredited. They write half-assed critiques and then launder it to sweeping claims like this in their bad journalism articles.

Citing these limitations, Georgia State University sociologist Callie Burt wrote in a recent commentary that the potential rewards of introducing polygenic scores into the social sciences “are few and greatly overstated.” (Genomics researchers have frequently suggested that polygenic scores for educational attainment could be used to control for individual genetic variation in social science experiments — much as one would control for, say family income — thereby allowing researchers to draw statistically meaningful conclusions from smaller sample groups.) Burt wrote that she had yet to see GWAS of social traits produce any findings “that change our understanding of environmental influences or suggest different policy or programmatic approaches.”

Sociology is fake, why should we care what one says? Defund immediately. GWAS doesn’t change understanding because we knew before it that IQ is highly heritable, doesn’t respond to interventions, and that stuff like school funding is a giant waste.

Matt McGue, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Minnesota, told Undark that although he’s generally a supporter of GWAS in the behavioral sciences, he thinks the techniques are unlikely to illuminate much about the biology of intelligence. “I’ve looked at some of the papers,” he said, “and I’m just not convinced that it’s really, really going to represent a major breakthrough in our understanding of intelligence.”

Now this is more what I agree with. Behavior genetics approaches are as of yet still superior to GWAS, which is underpowered because it requires sample sizes in the millions and beyond. Meanwhile twin studies can produce solid results with 3 figure samples. In the end, what I think will happen with GWAS is that in the next 20 years we’ll have a non-confounded IQ PGS that accounts for 45% to 65% of the variance in phenotypic IQ. There will be over 10,000 SNPs in the PGS, so this won’t readily yield the molecular stories people like Sasha Gusev want to see. The major benefit of this is use in embryo selection and identifying the genetic score of individuals, not in identifying the heritability of IQ or how intelligence works in the brain.

But in a blog post that September, Kirkegaard wrote that when he went to download the new data, the consortium had put in place a new restriction: To access the trove, petitioners needed to first create an account, using an institutional email address, and they had to agree not to use the data to make comparisons across ancestral groups.

This is excessively anti-science — the lows these people will go to for their feeble social ideals!