georgehemingto1

I mean jesus, of course family background is not independent of IQ, but assessments of family background can obviously be informative in understanding how we get from there to here. To say that, quote, "One's intelligence is not independent of one's family or genetic background" is a flaccid truism. Nonetheless particular comparisons within assessments of family background can obviously in principle be informative even if they are hard to do.

Your suggestion - with this fringe talk about "the sociologist's fallacy - is to eliminate any explanation from any study which does not assign success to invariant psychological metrics.

This is a total nothingburger, a long paragraph attacking a strawman of an argument you haven't even solicited the details of

also, to clarify things a bit: in my first comment i got a bit mixed up (fuck yeah lifelong learning disability) trying to make my point about lifelong attainment and the IQ analogy and made it sound like the paper in question was about IQ, which is incorrect.

The point stands however: controlling for educational background is a thing you can do in such a study as according to the factors I pointed to, and gwern's glib comment is wrong

honestly it's disappointing when i see people with training in stats make these comments: I'm a fucking poet if I'm anything at all and yet I find myself drawn into these ridiculous discussions about stats (in which I have no formal training) where I feel like I'm one of the only people in the room who knows how to divy up numbers

it's a triviality to say that you can control for educational attainment (and opportunities for education as well as class) when accounting for differences in IQ: it's hard to do in practice because social science is complicated and requires ACTUALLY DOING THE SCIENCE so gwern's glib comment is just wrong here

clearly we're talking about the impact on IQ of whatever factors we make up to describe IQ, and obviously, and provenly, education (and therefore the ability to get education) is in play here, which gwern's glib rebuttal ignores