[LINK] Loss of local knowledge affecting intellectual trends

People immersed in the life of a small town see a much smaller amount of environmental variation than those accustomed to cosmopolitan living - relatively more observed phenotypic variation should be a result of genetic variation. So cet par cosmopolitans are biased in an environmentalist direction relative to provincials, or to say the same thing, provincials are biased in an innatist direction relative to cosmopolitans (who are biased in an innatist direction relative to interdimensional travellers who've seen all sorts of logically possible human societies that haven't occurred in our timeline.)

It's not clear at all from this where the "unbiased" point would be (without a Bayesian incorporation of all other relevant information etc) or what that would even mean.

While he does make some points, the valedictorian comment seems to be potentially off-base. There is obviously a fair bit of genetics that goes to intelligence, but other things can cause inheritance in this fashion. For example, young children will see active older siblings as role-models to emulate. Similarly, different cultural norms in different families will impact how children and the families treat learning.

Consider for a minute the hypothetical of the same comment being made about the decline of the nobility in England. The same basic argument could be made, but there really isn't much that they had that was genetically advantageous.

Moreover, I suspect that most people won't look at the evidence for genetic intelligence anyways but will rather simply emphasize/adopt whatever view is most politically and ideologically convenient. This piece assumes a much higher degree of correlation between evidence and beliefs than is normally present, and also assumes that humans in the past were doing a decent job of taking subtle sorts of data and actually integrating it accurately into their world view.

This might be an excellent example of trends that can make a society grow more wrong over time or locked in a Red Queen's race situation where more and more data is needed just to keep changing intuitions from shifting further away from reality, despite nifty things like say the scientific method or computers.

One argument against the pure nurture point of view is that infants have different temperaments at birth, and this is something you're only likely to know if you've dealt with infants (or, like me, if you're a compulsive reader).

It's conceivable that all the temperamental variation among infants is caused by prenatal environment, but this doesn't seem likely.

This is very interesting but there is one obvious loose end that would be impossible to tie up. Nobody had any local knowledge about the people who drifted off. My aunt has pages and pages of our family tree compiled. A large fraction of the males in the tree (best guess from memory--I haven't looked at it in a while--a fourth to a third) went off to work or went off to the army or mysteriously disappeared at a very young age and nobody ever heard a word from them again. So your natured cohert is biased to those who never left home. This is a fundamental human difference and would probably be a useful axis of distinction for a big five type classification scheme. A lot of people never leave home. A lot of people return every Christmas and go to their high school reunion every five years.

And a lot of people just cannot be bothered to do so. A lot. And you will never capture them in your sample if you want to do a study like this. Even that famous 50 year longitudinal Harvard study which is supposedly the greatest trove of social science research we have has missing members due to this.

Seems quite coherent.

A strong case does not imply an important effect size.

It is far more likely that today you will be directly affected by the gravity of Pluto than that today you will trip on the sidewalk. A case explaining why I thought you likely to trip today would be weak and full of holes, while my case for gravity is much stronger.

The OP seems to me like a fixation on a very small thing, a story of why a factor should have an effect, totally ignoring most other factors on the effect and most other effects of the factor.

His points are individually cogent, but something about the tone of the piece makes me suspect Dark Arts at work. I'm generally rather suspicious of arguments deriving a broad range of evolutionary consequences (particularly gloomy ones) from some social trend; it's too easy to privilege the hypothesis in such cases, and hard to prove when it happens. And nature vs. nurture is a topic I'm particularly suspicious of, since it bears directly on a number of social policy issues.

The post tells a plausible story, but within the space of plausible stories I don't see much that privileges it. If it was supported by data, that'd be another thing; perhaps you could look at the reproductive success of the relatives of people with schizophrenia or other externally obvious problems with heritable components, and compare between rural and urban settings. Or just take a survey on attitudes towards nature vs. nurture, although in that case you'd probably have to control for age and politics (rural areas skew older and more conservative).

(Anecdotally, I did grow up in a small town, and while I knew the parents and siblings of most of my friends growing up I don't think I had enough data to put together a clear picture of family traits. Upstate California in the 1990s is a far cry from the Kalahari, though.)

I'm going to go on record saying that the blog post and subsequent thread have made no sense to me so far. This is the sort of confusion that isn't common for me when I read things here.

meshes well with findings that the more children parents have the less they subscribe to nurture, since they finally, possibly for the first time ever, get some hands on experience with the nurture (nurture as in stuff like upbringing not nurture as in lead paint) versus. nature issue

Interesting - where are these findings reported?

I agree - though since most people have gross misunderstandings of genetics, then they might also think - "Well - they have the same parents and yet they're still so different!"- so then they might ascribe less to heredity too (and more to birth order or certain other environmental influences)

That's an insightful post, linking ideas that were previously unrelated in my mind - cultural differences between the city and the countryside; different opinions on heritability of traits; and possibly genetic profiling (as an alternative for knowing about the whole family history of someone).

Maybe an alternative way of phrasing it is that as society gets more complex, the effect of single variables is harder and harder to discern. Add to that that the "accumulated knowledge of the ancients" loses value as life changes faster and faster (one's grandfather's career advice is less and less useful), and it becomes harder and harder for individuals to predict their future (education, literacy and media work against that, but are probably not strong enough).

Consider a separate possibility: competition and opportunity abounds in urban areas, placing additional value on intelligence and skill acquisition. Since there is nothing which can be done about intelligence, really, focusing on skill acquisition is a better strategy. Parents who believe very thoroughly in the nurture argument may be much more willing to invest heavily in their child's education, expecting far greater benefits than are actually possible. Because the perceived value of success is higher it succeeds more often in the face of discounting.

In this case, the false belief is highly adaptive socially, with people adhering to it acquiring better positions in society. While this does not really lend itself to much genetic replication, meme spread should accelerate. I think that, prima facie, we should prefer this explanation; because it does not rely on stories LessWrongians may find aggrandizing, it is less likely that we will be accepting this narrative through bias.

If Schizophrenia is skyrocketing due to its maladaptiveness diminishing, what's so adaptive about it that it's taking over the gene pool?

Just posted a link to this thread in a comment on the blog itself, hope I didn't violate any netiquette by doing so.