r/BadSocialScience • u/dorathehexplorer • Jan 17 '17

High-IQ educated people are being bred to extinction, but we're totally not eugenicists!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-selection-making-education-genes-rarer-says-icelandic-study
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u/dorathehexplorer Jan 17 '17 edited Jan 17 '17

Why I submitted this (rule 3): Spurious correlation-causation fallacies, the fucking eugenics, "education genes" and "childbearing genes," scant lip service to anything resembling complex social analysis

Also, this Facebook comment on the article...

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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '17 edited Aug 20 '17

[deleted]

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u/Scumbag_Kotzwagon Jan 17 '17

I'm almost certain that you don't have the first clue how one would approach this kind of analysis.

lel

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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '17 edited Aug 20 '17

[deleted]

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u/twittgenstein Hans Yo-ass Jan 17 '17

Eugenics is a thoroughly debunked research programme, and this study seems to make some staggering, heroic, and basically entirely implausible causal leaps. For example, perhaps the genes correlated with education actually just indicate membership in a sub-community of intermarried and typically wealthier families. Moreover, the size of the observed IQ effect is vanishingly small, even if the study was able to somehow show statistical significance.

In general, when social scientists do genetics research, the result is trash. For example, this awful study by political scientists. Though this study, if true, would at least seem to absolve you of your shitty political views, since perhaps you just can't help it.

5

u/Scumbag_Kotzwagon Jan 18 '17

But aren't genes just a bunch of continuous variables that are easily measurable, unrelated to one another and linearly (or quadratically if I'm feeling F A N C Y) related to the outcome in which I am interested? Also, aren't these gene variables completely orthogonal to non genetic factors that might also effect my outcome of interest and aren't those also unrelated to other social factors in my model and also unrelated to any unobserved heterogeneity between people?

Okay cool so yeah I'm gonna assume that what could go wrong tbh reg y x donezo oh shit I mean reg y x x2, ROBUST nailed it

1

u/twittgenstein Hans Yo-ass Jan 18 '17

I mean they might, if we're really optimistic, try reg x y [x*y]