TLDR:
A very long, rambling blog post that essentially says "yeah there's probably genetic differences related to IQ among groups of humans but...", then proceeds to dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as part of "a vocal fringe of race pseudoscience".
The “long, rambling blog post” outlines a number of pieces of evidence that say it’s highly unlikely there are meaningful differences, and because of population stratification, stuff like GWAS (that Hsu uses) can’t give us a lot of info. Look, if you have questions or doubts about these criticisms, you can ask and people will take those questions seriously. Ewan Birney is a world class geneticist that leads Europe’s leading institute on the subject. He’s writing a blog post for lay people to help them understand the complexities. What you wrote in response just shows how blinded you are in just discounting other arguments.
Look, I don’t know who you are; you can look me up (https://www.octant.bio/biosri).. but maybe when most experts in a field are saying one thing, and one person on the fringe is saying another... you at least owe it to yourself to understand the dominant viewpoint. It’s easy to find my email, or Ewan’s or many other researchers that take a lot of time answering questions. Quantitative genetics is complicated and in that blog post he’s trying to break down the major ways people get this stuff wrong; including Hsu. But in general, most on this site thus far have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct. Anyways, if you are not a layperson I apologize and as a researcher, you can always just publish your findings, and the community and I can learn from them.
The two "quotes" in my comment:
>>[...] that essentially says "yeah there's probably genetic differences related to IQ among groups of humans but..." [...]
English isn't my first language, but it's crystal clear that this isn't a direct quote but is a summary of my thoughts on their argument.
>>[...] "a vocal fringe of race pseudoscience".
If you read your own link you would know that this is a direct quote.
But please, continue to educate me on punctuation.
>What you wrote in response just shows how blinded you are in just discounting other arguments.
That's rich coming from someone who started their comment with "Lol; what I thought." And someone who started their first reply to my original comment by questioning my sincerity.
>But in general, most on this site thus far have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct.
Where could they possibly get that idea? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585765)
Finally, what was the point of trying to flex your credentials? You spent an entire comment reinforcing the idea that academics like you "have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct."
anyways, the flex is because you now know who I am and what I research. If you have serious questions about the above topics... the same topics for why most people don't take Hsu seriously, feel free to email them to me. In the meantime, I am laughing because you were anything but sincere.
And you have no reply to my criticisms of your sarcastic, ad hominem filled reply.
>>You spent an entire comment reinforcing the idea that academics like you "have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct."
Look in the mirror once in a while.
I know what it's like to achieve an extremely high level of expertise in a narrow field; I've done it myself. It forever blinds you to the way a novice sees the same field.
If you've ever wondered why there's increasing skepticism of academia, you should read your comments again. They are nasty, sarcastic, and dismissive.
I'll paste this one more time because I think you need to seriously consider that you are exhibiting exactly the behavior that you're accusing others of:
>[...] have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct.
I don't quite understand what the point is. The main crux of it seems to be "argument by obfuscation", a lot of deferral to (scientific) authority and a lot of "sophiscated" words (hoping that the reader will also defer to authority).
The author seems to argue something like: we can't know this because (1) genetics are complicated, (2) we don't have enough data, (3) the data that we do have is hard to understand, and (4) even if we could draw conclusions from the data, we couldn't generalize them on other populations. This seems like a coop-out - I'm 100% that in the future, we'll have more data, and we'll have better tools to understand the data, so whatever conclusions we make, will be that much more certain.
Also, part of the author's argument seems to be "there wasn't significant evolutionary pressure on these traits". So what? Obviously there are differences in traits that have no evolutionary pressure (e.g. why do SE Asians have slanted eyes? was there some evolutionary pressure for that?), there's lack of differences even when there is evolutionary pressure (e.g. female sex selection seems to prefer height, yet non-Dutch Europeans and SE Asians are smaller; in addition, the latter haven't developed ability to digest milk after infancy, despite presumably the same evolutionary pressures); finally, there's traits that do conform to evolutionary pressure, including all of the ones I highlight above (tall Dutch, smart Jews, fast Kenyans). Either different populations face different evolutionary pressures so have developed different traits, or all populations face the same evolutionary pressures and some have failed to develop some traits. In any case, it's more than possible that there are population-wide differences even in heritable IQ, and we just can't confirm or deny that yet (we already know there are "sub-population-wide" differences, e.g. Ashkenazi Jews).
Part of the authors argument is also that because most studies are done on Europeans, they can't be generalized. Again, irrelevant. The examples I pointed out are "within population" - Kalenjin run faster than other Kenyans, Dutch are taller than other Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other Europeans and other Jews.
The author also argues that it's somehow invalid to exclude recent "immigrants" when studying a population. Why? Obviously if I study Ashkenazi Jew IQ, I'd exclude other (non-Jewish) Europeans, as well as non-Ashkenazi Jews (e.g. Sephardi) and those who are not genetically Ashkenazi Jews (e.g. people who recently converted to the religion). I can't see how that would be "unscientific".
> it is virtually inconceivable that the primary determinant of racial categories – that is skin colour – is strongly associated with the genetic architecture that relates to intelligence.
The author either lacks imagination, or his/her imagination is stifled by political correctness. We know this claim is false, as "race" is associated with height (Europeans are on average taller than SE Asians - and I looked up Japan specifically, a first-world country, so don't "nutrition" me), which is also a complex trait.
To conclude, there's only 3 possible answers to the question of "Why are Ashkenazi Jews smarter?": (1) They aren't. (2) It's (mostly) genetic. and (3) It's mostly not genetic (nutrition, culture, etc.). I don't see the author's incoherent rambling (you can see that I've become more and more disappointed by the article as I read it) arguing in either of these directions, in particular I don't see any argument to dismiss (2), except a few weak sauce non-arguments that I criticize above. I also don't see anything against Steve Hsu's argument, which is basically that IQ & height are at least partially genetic, we'll soon be able to predict them from genes, then we'll be able to use it in embryo selection.
Therefore, I'm going to summarily dismiss your argument and disregard other sources you suggest, unless you can come up with a short counterargument to (2) above that doesn't fail in the silly ways as this article does.
Edit: This isn't to say that I'm not open to other explanations... Maybe Kalenjin just are training better. Maybe Ashkenazi just are rearing their children better. Maybe the Dutch are eating the right food that makes them grow taller. But I find that unlikely (their secrets would have gotten out already) and in any case, I'm mainly just saying that we can't dismiss either explanation.
1. 'evolutionary pressure on traits' -> so what? It's important, because we are usually much better powered at detecting purifying selection in traits.
2. As for the slanted eyes: why do you think there was no pressure? Assortative mating is a thing.. it's very prevalent in visible traits and really makes this hard.
3. Preference for height... umm ok - this is weird. There are plenty of known examples for purifying height selection in either direction. However, these are rare variants and not the major driver of height variation within bigger populations. Height is actually a good example for looking at variation within populations: https://elifesciences.org/articles/39702 Basically it says that population stratification is a major problem for things that are easily measurable like height (unlike intelligence, which is much harder to measure and way more likely to have known social covariates).
4. In general, you aren't even understanding the simplified responses that the authors are trying to explain, but also can't seem to grasp there might be more that you are not understanding – and just ascribe things to lack of imagination or political correctness of the authors.. who are world class geneticists. You can lead a camel to water...
If I understa correctly, your point is that there are things that are easy to see (matters for sexual selection) and/or measure (matters for science) and IQ is neither... but those aren’t the only causes of genetic differences? You also have survival pressure (presumably running faster would be here) and just random drift as well (presumably that’s how slanted eyes and blond hair first developed). You didn’t answer which of the options I listed regarding Jewish IQ is correct. Alternatively, why are humans smarter than chimps?
Also, regarding your (4), scientists are notorious for submitting to pressure from the wokeness mob, and in touchy subjects like genetics in particular, so it’s not an unreasonable assumption on my part.