Do you have any argument as to why what a social scientist says today is more valid than what one said 20 years ago?

I'd trust social scientists less today than 20 years ago due to the effect of social media on them. Social media creates much stronger social pressure on people to conform, and that isn't a good thing for science.

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tptacek 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Alex Strudwick Young isn't a "social scientist".

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Jensson 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah ok, yeah genetics science has came a long way 20 years so there it makes more sense to listen to modern stuff, but why the scare quotes? Do you have a problem with social scientists?

Edit: Looked him up and he disagrees with you. "My sense is that heritability of IQ is in the range of 30-70% with very high confidence.", you said "It's likely somewhere between 15%-50%". There is a massive difference between 30-70 and 15-50, 30-70 sounds much more reasonable and matches most studies on the subject I have seen.

https://x.com/AlexTISYoung/status/1889044121433571803

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tptacek 13 hours ago | parent [-]

No, I don't. But you've lost track of the thread, because I didn't claim he said 15-50%. There's a reason I cited him where I did: to point out how silly the 0.80 estimate the previous commenter's cite was in current context. His antecedent in this thread is "even hereditarians...".

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Jensson 13 hours ago | parent [-]

But now we have an authority figure saying 30-70, so I'll trust that over your 15-50. And yes I know why you didn't cite the 30-70, its because you disagree with it. You shouldn't say others use biased examples and then say you believe it could be as low as 15% without anything to back that up.

	▲	tptacek 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		He didn't use a "biased example"; he used a prehistoric example based on premodern methology. The only thing we've established here is that he doesn't understand his own cite. later In other words, I deliberately cited someone on his side of the debate. How much do I love that this person got promoted from woke social scientist to "authority figure" in the space of one Google query, though? Amazing.