Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Actually she says the paper is bad science, and says why in her Twitter feed. She's actually calling for more research, supporting more complex narratives.

Meanwhile here, we're seeing that correlation does not imply causation except when it supports common prejudices and simplistic narratives. Then it absolutely does.

View on HN

She states simply that it didn't look for proper controls or caveats. As I said in my original comment, I would need an in-depth analysis of why the study is bad. Merely mentioning controls is not enough to convince me, even if the person has a PhD.

And as for her "calling for more research", that is simply not true:

    This is one open access article the world does not need right now.

She is literally saying here that it should not have been published.

I don't know what she could possibly mean by 'proper controls'. They're twins. They are better controls for each other (full siblings raised simultaneously of exactly the same age) than you see in 99.9% of sociology or education studies; in some respects they are the best controls that are possible, since you can't run a person through school multiple times to see if they get into college or not. And this study also came with polygenic scores so you can check the genetics directly if you've fallen for handwavy criticisms like of the EEA.

(Heck, she's not even right when she mouths 'correlation != causation', because if you used the PGS to compare siblings, their PGS differences are randomized at conception and the correlation = causation! As far as I can tell, OP didn't do this, just scoring unrelated individuals, but they could have, many other studies have, and she doesn't seem to've checked herself.)

I think blank slate is the common prejudice and simplistic narrative. Calling out the paper as bad science without giving any valid reason is stupid. If the argument had been that a single study is not enough to conclude the author's conclusions (which are not too broad). But one can say that to any study in a new/nascent topic.

But what is in the thread is that such a study should not have been published because it violates ethics, without pointing out the scientific flaws in such a study.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com