timtyler comments on BHTV: Eliezer Yudkowsky & Razib Khan - Less Wrong
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Does anyone else here have any familiarity with the field in question? I found Tim's reasoning from published research surprisingly convincing. Yet Razib has given an appeal to his own authority denying that data that also has some credibility behind it.
I don't have the background knowledge to resolve the disagreement myself and I get the impression that the literature will give conflicting viewpoints that are hard for me to unravel in an acceptable amount of time.
My prior p(Tim is right | he is disagreeing with someone else here) isn't very high but my prior p(someone is right | they have made a stand that would be a significantly socially detrimental to change in either the short or long term && their arguing seems oriented to consolidating their own status and questioning the status of the opponent) isn't much different. Actual evidence from Razib would, of course, have dominated other considerations.
I have updated somewhat in the direction of "genes that have some moderate or at least minor but significant correlation with IQ have been identified" but it would be more in my social interest to assert a position of hard agnosticism with respect to IQ-genes for the purpose of affiliation. I am open to persuasion on either the IQ-research evidence or on how my reasoning 'ought-to' go when I encounter this sort of ambiguous input.
I don't think I can trust karma too much in this case as I know my first impulses would bias my voting against Tim and towards the guy blogging heads with Eliezer and so don't expect others to be any different.
A brief overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#The_search_for_specific_genes