taw comments on Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Less Wrong

17 Post author: jsalvatier 29 May 2012 06:00PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_M 31 May 2012 03:05:18PM 7 points [-]

Well, then I'm puzzled why you didn't reply to these misguided assertions.

In any case, the paper you cite may well be correct point-by-point, but on the whole, it's a lawyerly argument that tries to overwhelm and misguide the readers by amassing a pile of hand-picked one-way evidence that will dazzle them and make them lose sight of the overall balance of evidence. As I wrote in that earlier comment thread in response to similar points:

As for heritability studies, you are certainly right that there is a lot of shoddy work, and by necessity they make a whole lot of wildly simplifying assumptions. If there existed only a handful of such studies, one would be well advised not to take them very seriously. However, the amount of data that has been gathered in recent decades is just too overwhelming to dismiss, especially taking into account that often there have been considerable ideological incentives to support the opposite conclusions.

Comment author: taw 31 May 2012 10:57:08PM -1 points [-]

Well, then I'm puzzled why you didn't reply to these misguided assertions.

Sadly there are many blind spots here where groupthink rules, and people will just happily downvote anybody who has a different opinion. They are not worth replying to. I see the downvote brigade found this thread as well.