I didn't mean to sound too derisive, heritability is an actually useful metric as far as I can tell, it's just not as intuitive or monosemantic as a lot people will make it out to be, especially in the absence of significant correlating DNA evidence.
Siskind strawmans this into the alleged opposition desperately claiming that "it's not genetic unless there's a specific gene you can point to", aka the bitches dont know bout my poly/omnigenic traits argument.
Emil Kirkegaard of all fucking people shows up in the comments to call him out on misunderstanding variance.
Don't know about the actual literature, but confusing heritability to mean 'concrete chance to inherit' instead of "broad measure of influence of unspecified genetic factors on a population wrt developing a condition, once environmental influences are modeled out according to our paper's methodology" is extremely common in the wild even by people who should know better.
Siskind seems ticked off because recent papers on the genetics of schizophrenia are increasingly pointing out that at current miniscule levels of prevalence, even with the commonly accepted 80% heritability, actually developing the disorder is all but impossible unless at least some of the environmental factors are also in play, which is very worrisome since it indicates that even high heritability issues might be solvable without immediately employing eugenics.
From the comments:
I am someone who takes great interest in scientific findings outside his own area of expertise.
I find it rather disheartening to discover that most of it is rather bunk, and
ChatGPT, write me up an example of a terminal case of engineers disease and post it to acx to see if they'll catch on to it.
Had to google shit-test, apparently it's a PUA term, what a surprise.
I really like how he specifies he only does it when with white people, just to dispel any doubt this happens in the context of discussing Lovecraft's cat.
If books could kill is so much fun.
tvtropes
The reason Keltham wants to have two dozen wives and 144 children, is that he knows Civilization doesn't think someone with his psychological profile is worth much to them, and he wants to prove otherwise. What makes having that many children a particularly forceful argument is that he knows Civilization won't subsidize him to have children, as they would if they thought his neurotype was worth replicating. By succeeding far beyond anyone's wildest expectations in spite of that, he'd be proving they were not just mistaken about how valuable selfishness is, but so mistaken that they need to drastically reevaluate what they thought they knew about the world, because obviously several things were wrong if it led them to such a terrible prediction.
huh
Past 1M words
That's gonna be 4.000 pages of extremely dubious porn and rationalist navel gazing, if anyone's keeping count.
you’re seriously missing the point of what he’s trying to say. He’s just talking about [extremely mundane and self evident motte argument]
Nah, we're just not giving him the benefit of a doubt and also have a lot of context to work with.
Consider the fact that he explicitly writes that you are allowed to reconsider your assumptions on domestic terrorism if a second trans mass shooter incident "happens in a row" but a few paragraphs later Effective Altruists blowing up both FTX and OpenAI in the space of a year the second incident is immediately laundered away as the unfortunate result of them overcorrecting in good faith against unchecked CEO power.
This should stick out even to one approaching this with a blank slate perspective in my opinion.
Hi, my name is Scott Alexander and here's why it's bad rationalism to think that widespread EA wrongdoing should reflect poorly on EA.
The assertion that having semi-frequent sexual harassment incidents go public is actually an indication of health for a movement since it's evidence that there's no systemic coverup going on and besides everyone's doing it is uh quite something.
But surely of 1,000 sexual harassment incidents, the movement will fumble at least one of them (and often the fact that you hear about it at all means the movement is fumbling it less than other movements that would keep it quiet). You’re not going to convince me I should update much on one (or two, or maybe even three) harassment incidents, especially when it’s so easy to choose which communities’ dirty laundry to signal boost when every community has a thousand harassers in it.
It's both, probably. Sounds like the Alice and Bob of compsci security parable fame, except pretentious, and Mallory is the writer.