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PendingKetchup comments on my recent post on what it means for something to be heritable:

The article seems pretty good at math and thinking through unusual implications, but my armchair Substack eugenics alarm that I keep in the back of my brain is beeping.

Saying that variance was “invented for the purpose of defining heritability” is technically correct, but that might not be the best kind of correct in this case, because it was invented by the founder of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society who had decided, presumably to support that project, that he wanted to define something called “heritability”.

His particular formula for heritability is presented in the article as if it has odd traits but is obviously basically a sound thing to want to calculate, despite the purpose it was designed for.

The vigorous “educational attainment is 40% heritable, well OK maybe not but it’s a lot heritable, stop quibbling” hand waving sounds like a person who wants to show but can’t support a large figure. And that framing of education, as something “attained” by people, rather than something afforded to or invested in them, is almost completely backwards at least through college.

The various examples about evil despots and unstoppable crabs highlight how heritability can look large or small independent of more straightforward biologically-mechanistic effects of DNA. But they still give the impression that those are the unusual or exceptional cases.

In reality, there are in fact a lot of evil crabs, doing things like systematically carting away resources from Black children’s* schools, and then throwing them in jail. We should expect evil-crab-based explanations of differences between people to be the predominant ones.

*Not to say that being Black “is genetic”. Things from accent to how you style your hair to how you dress to what country you happen to be standing in all contribute to racial judgements used for racism. But “heritability” may not be the right tool to disentangle those effects.

Dear PendingKetchup,

Thanks for complimenting my math (♡), for reading all the way to the evil crabs, and for not explicitly calling me a racist or eugenicist. I also appreciate that you chose sincerity over boring sarcasm and that you painted such a vibrant picture of what you were thinking while reading my post. I hope you won’t mind if I respond in the same spirit.

To start, I’d like to admit something. When I wrote that post, I suspected some people might have reactions similar to yours. I don’t like that. I prefer positive feedback! But I’ve basically decided to just let reactions like yours happen, because I don’t know how to avoid them without compromising on other core goals.

It sounds like my post gave you a weird feeling. Would it be fair to describe it as a feeling that I’m not being totally upfront about what I really think about race / history / intelligence / biological determinism / the ideal organization of society?

Because if so, you’re right. It’s not supposed to be a secret, but it’s true.

Why? Well, you may doubt this, but when I wrote that post, my goal was that people who read it would come away with a better understanding of the meaning of heritability and how weird it is. That’s it.

Do I have some deeper and darker motivations? Probably. If I probe my subconscious, I find traces of various embarrassing things like “draw attention to myself” or “make people think I am smart” or “after I die, live forever in the world of ideas through my amazing invention of blue-eye-seeking / human-growth-hormone-injecting crabs.”

What I don’t find are any goals related to eugenics, Ronald Fisher, the heritability of educational attainment, if “educational attainment” is good terminology, racism, oppression, schools, the justice system, or how society should be organized.

These were all non-goals for basically two reasons:

My views on those issues aren’t very interesting or notable. I didn’t think anyone would (or should) care about them.
Surely, there is some place in the world for things that just try to explain what heritability really means? If that’s what’s promised, then it seems weird to drop in a surprise morality / politics lecture.

At the same time, let me concede something else. The weird feeling you got as you read my post might be grounded in statistical truth. That is, it might be true that many people who blog about things like heritability have social views you wouldn’t like. And it might be true that some of them pretend at truth-seeking but are mostly just charlatans out to promote those unliked-by-you social views.

You’re dead wrong to think that’s what I’m doing. All your theories of things I’m trying to suggest or imply are unequivocally false. But given the statistical realities, I guess I can’t blame you too much for having your suspicions.

So you might ask—if my goal is just to explain heritability, why not make that explicit? Why not have a disclaimer that says, “OK I understand that heritability is fraught and blah blah blah, but I just want to focus on the technical meaning because…”?

One reason is that I think that’s boring and condescending. I don’t think people need me to tell them that heritability is fraught. You clearly did not need me to tell you that.

Also, I don’t think such disclaimers make you look neutral. Everyone knows that people with certain social views (likely similar to yours) are more likely to give such disclaimers. And they apply the same style of statistical reasoning you used to conclude I might be a eugenicist. I don’t want people who disagree with those social views to think they can’t trust me.

Paradoxically, such disclaimers often seem to invite more objections from people who share the views they’re correlated with, too. Perhaps that’s because the more signals we get that someone is on “our” side, the more we tend to notice ideological violations. (I’d refer here to the narcissism of small differences, though I worry you may find that reference objectionable.)

If you want to focus on the facts, the best strategy seems to be serene and spiky: to demonstrate by your actions that you are on no one’s side, that you don’t care about being on anyone’s side, and that your only loyalty is to readers who want to understand the facts and make up their own damned mind about everything else.

I’m not offended by your comment. I do think it’s a little strange that you’d publicly suggest someone might be a eugenicist on the basis of such limited evidence. But no one is forcing me to write things and put them on the internet.

The reason I’m writing to you is that you were polite and civil and seem well-intentioned. So I wanted you to know that your world model is inaccurate. You seem to think that because my post did not explicitly support your social views, it must have been written with the goal of undermining those views. And that is wrong.

The truth is, I wrote that post without supporting your (or any) social views because I think mixing up facts and social views is bad. Partly, that’s just an aesthetic preference. But if I’m being fully upfront, I also think it’s bad in the consequentialist sense that it makes the world a worse place.

Why do I think this? Well, recall that I pointed out that if there were crabs that injected blue-eyed babies with human growth hormone, that would increase the heritability of height. You suggest I had sinister motives for giving this example, as if I was trying to conceal the corollary that if the environment provided more resources to people with certain genes (e.g. skin color) that could increase the heritability of other things (e.g. educational attainment).

Do you really think you’re the only reader to notice that corollary?

The degree to which things are “heritable” depends on the nature of society. This is a fact. It’s a fact that many people are not aware of. It’s also a fact that—I guess—fits pretty well with your social views. I wanted people to understand that. Not out of loyalty to your social views, but because it is true.

It seems that you’re annoyed that I didn’t phrase all my examples in terms of culture war. I could have done that. But I didn’t, because I think my examples are easier to understand, and because the degree to which changing society might change the heritability of some trait is a contentious empirical question.

But OK. Imagine I had done that. And imagine all the examples were perfectly aligned with your social views. Do you think that would have made the post more or less effective in convincing people that the fact we’re talking about is true? I think the answer is: Far less effective.

I’ll leave you with two questions:

Question 1: Do you care about the facts? Do you believe the facts are on your side?

Question 2: Did you really think I wrote that post with with the goal of promoting eugenics?

If you really did think that, then great! I imagine you’ll be interested to learn that you were incorrect.

But just as you had an alarm beeping in your head as you read my post, I had one beeping in my head as I read your comment. My alarm was that you were playing a bit of a game. It’s not that you really think I wanted to promote eugenics, but rather that you’re trying to enforce a norm that everyone must give constant screaming support to your social views and anyone who’s even slightly ambiguous should be ostracized.

Of course, this might be a false alarm! But if that is what you’re doing, I have to tell you: I think that’s a dirty trick, and a perfect example of why mixing facts and social views is bad.

You may disagree with all my motivations. That’s fine. (I won’t assume that means you are a eugenicist.) All I ask is that you disapprove accurately.

xox
dynomight