First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Conley et al. would have been relevant a decade ago when they find that observable facts and phenotypes have no measurable genetic correlates. We now know, that no heritable trait seems to have them and that our understanding of genes and heritage is seriously incomplete. Thus the far reaching conclusion they draw from their non-result is unwarranted.
And even if it were not and if we take their result at face value, it is open to a completely different interpretation. Through all of history educated men have tended to marry highly intelligent women, who, regardless of their lack of formal education, were able to provide meaningful conversation and advice, which tended to promote stratification by intelligence. Today they are duped by women trained to fake intelligence through formal education and degrees in the content-free prattling subjects.
Their tentative result is also at odds with the the solid and well founded ones by Gregory Clark and Volkmar Weiss.
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Yeager et al. is a valid and valuable study and it proves that cultaral disadvantage is real. My only niggle is about their presentation of the results. As always they use the standard error and treat advantaged and disadvantaged students as single, homogenous entities, for which one single measure is an appropriate description, and not an internally variable group, that needs to be described through an entire distribution of the trait. From their diagram the measured individual achievements of the two groups do not overlap at all, which is an obvious nonsense.
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As one conforming to the stereotypical picture of engineers more than most, I must admit, that in spite of all condemnation of crime and violence I can’t deny a certain appreciation for Islamicist base values, just like Gambetta & Hertog predict. As most researchers and counter-terrorist practitioners tend to come from the social sciences and lack this basic empathy, they probably could do worse then integrating some members with an engineering background into their teams.