My favorite part of this @NathanJRobinson critique of DeBoer’s “cult of the smart” is when he describes a position that is pretty damn close to mine as “a little bit of a mindfuck”: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/09/we-dont-know-our-potential

In my thread on DeBoer, I objected to his characterization of heritability — he is weak on the understanding of genetics. But I think this critique gets it wrong too, with too sweeping dismissals of the idea that we could ever say anything about individual diffs

@NathanJRobinson points out, correctly, that (1) genetic effects are not deterministic, (2) non-zero heritabilities can be produced via social mechanisms, (3) heritabilities themselves differ across time and place, and....

(4) given causal complexity, we cannot infer that a given individual’s phenotype is due to their genotype.

But, none of those things is a get out of jail free card for having to grapple with the implications of genetics for social inequality

To understand why, imagine that someone wrote an article making these exact same points about the effects of childhood social class on adult outcomes...

Which they could. Because all of those things would still be true.

childhood social environments are not deterministic, the effects of social environments always interact with the child’s biology, the effects of family social class differ across historical time and place, and given causal complexity, it’s generally impossible to say....

whether a given individual is experiencing X outcome because they were rich/poor.

ALL social outcomes are multifactorial and devilishly complex to study which is why the social sciences are the hardest sciences.

But, we don’t say, “well, poverty isn’t deterministic and our studies of poverty rely on simplified linear models so we don’t have to care, policy-wise or in our conceptions of justice, about the fact that
ON AVERAGE
IN THIS SOCIETY
children who grow up poor have worse outcomes“

ON AVERAGE
IN THIS SOCIETY
Children who are born with a certain combination of genetic variants go further in school, and then our society pretends they deserve more of every single good because of their merit, and no amount of gene-environment interactionism makes that go away

It’s a bit ironic that he leans on Turkheimer so much for his critique because it was @ent3c who, back in the 1990s, issued a call for a leftist interpretation of behavior genetics, which is exactly what DeBoer is trying to do with his book: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yxroekekdp6asyw/1997-turkheimer.pdf?dl=0

in sum: genes don’t have to be deterministic for us to take them seriously as a systematic force in human lives; social/behavioral genomics can’t all be waved away as “bad science”

my older thread, where I live-tweet my speed-reading of DeBoer, here https://twitter.com/kph3k/status/1291138059036172290?s=20