From f05607a7a9a8d61e7cdeb0a16d74bbb6918f1dad Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2020 08:30:23 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] Human Diversity review Wed. morning drafting: residual differences --- content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md | 10 +++------- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md index d826063..3834c0d 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -22,11 +22,9 @@ Murray also addresses the issue of aggregating effect sizes—something [I've be Subsequent chapers address sex differences in personality, cognition, interests, and the brain. It turns out that women are more warm, empathetic, æsthetically discerning, and cooperative than men are! They're also more into the Conventional, Artistic, and Social dimensions of the [Holland occupational-interests model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Codes). -You might think that this is all due to socialization, but then it's hard to explain why the same differences show up in different cultures—and why (counterintuitively) the differences seem _larger_ in richer, more feminist countries. You might think that the "larger differences in rich countries" result is an artifact: maybe people in less-feminist countries implicitly make within-sex comparisons when answering personality questions (_e.g._, "I'm aggressive _for a woman_") whereas people in more-feminist countries use a less sexist standard of comparison, construing ratings as compared to people-in-general. Murray points out that this explanation still posits the existence of large sex differences in rich countries (while explaining away the unexpected cross-cultural difference in sex differences). Another possibility is that wealth increases sexual dimorphism _in general_, including, _e.g._, height and blood pressure, not just in personality. +You might think that this is all due to socialization, but then it's hard to explain why the same differences show up in different cultures—and why (counterintuitively) the differences seem _larger_ in richer, more feminist countries. You might think that the "larger differences in rich countries" result is an artifact: maybe people in less-feminist countries implicitly make within-sex comparisons when answering personality questions (_e.g._, "I'm aggressive _for a woman_") whereas people in more-feminist countries use a less sexist standard of comparison, construing ratings as compared to people-in-general. Murray points out that this explanation still posits the existence of large sex differences in rich countries (while explaining away the unexpected cross-cultural difference-in-differences). Another possibility is that wealth increases sexual dimorphism _in general_, including, _e.g._, height and blood pressure, not just in personality. -Women are better at verbal ability and social cognition, whereas men are better at visuospatial skills. - -Murray devotes a section discussing [dimensions which they lie] +Women are better at verbal ability and social cognition, whereas men are better at visuospatial skills. The sexes achieve similar levels of overall performance via somewhat different mental "toolkits." Murray devotes a section to a 2007 result of Johnson and Bouchard, who report that ["_g_ masks the dimensions on which [sex differences in mental abilities] lie"](/papers/johnson-bouchard-sex_differences_in_mental_abilities_g_masks_the_dimensions.pdf): overall levels of mental well-functioning lead to underestimates of the effect sizes of specific mental abilities, which you want to statistically correct for. This result in particular is _super gratifying_ to me personally, because [I independently had a similar idea](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)—it's _super validating_ as an amateur to find that the pros have been thinking along the same track! The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as found by endeavors such as [Li _et al._ 2008](/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf)) that when you throw clustering and [dimensionality-reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction) algorithms at SNP data (single nucleotide polymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "races". @@ -40,9 +38,7 @@ You might think that there wasn't enough _time_ in the 2–5k generations since Another mechanism of recent human evolution is _introgression_: early humans interbred with our Neanderthal and Denisovan "cousins", giving our lineage the chance to "steal" all their good alleles! In contrast to new mutations, which usually die out even when they're beneficial (that 2s rule again), alleles "flowing" from another population keep getting reintroduced, giving them more chances to sweep! -[TODO: association studies "trained" on one population don't perform as well against a "test set" from another population] - -[frequencies of SNPs for schizophrenia correlate well for subpops on the same continent (p. 187–8)] +Population differences are important when working with genome-wide association studies, because a model "trained on" one population won't perform as well against the "test set" of a different population. Suppose you do a big study and find a bunch of SNPs that correlate with a trait, like schizophrenia or liking opera. The frequencies of those SNPs for two populations from the same continent (like Japanese and Chinese) will hugely correlate (_r_ ≈ 0.97), but for more genetically-distant populations from different continents, the correlation will still be big but not huge (like _r_ ≈ 0.8 or whatever). [table p. 192] -- 2.17.1