Geoffrey Miller on Manifold, Breaking Academic Myths

Over at Steve Hsu's Manifold there is an interesting interview with Geoffrey Miller of UNewMexico - transcript available at the link, if a 100-minute podcast is not to your liking - They hit on a number of topics that have been big here, such as the mere lip-service that is given to genetics in behavioral sciences, 

However, if you look at the actual numbers of psychology faculty, there's probably less than 500 evolutionary psychologists worldwide actively doing research, versus there's probably 20,000. Social psychologists and something like 40 to 50,000, neuroscientists in psych departments. So, evo psych is a tiny, tiny, tiny field with kind of outsized impact, especially in terms of public thinking. But as with behavior genetics, which is another fairly small psych field, its influence has been successfully quiet, limited by, by the left, basically in, in the behavioral sciences.

(Steven Jay Gould is still taught as if he were an authority, after all. And everyone says 'Oh yeah, genetics of course. It's a big part of this.  They lie.) 

However, there are not a whole lot of super talented grad students coming into the field because they can, they can read the writing on the wall.They know if they study psych it'll be extremely hard to get a tenure track job or to succeed in American academia. And that's sad, but that's kind of where we're at. You know, hopefully the pendulum swings back in a few years and people, maybe the left having a strangle hold on. What ideas you're allowed to research is kind of a bad idea....

...And the extraordinary thing is, you know, if you'd asked me back in the late eighties in grad school, will people still be doing kind of social and developmental studies that are not genetically informed, where they don't bother gathering DNA and they don't bother, sampling from, you know, families with twins or adopted studies? I think no way, it couldn't possibly be the case that in 30 years people are still doing genetically uninformed studies and saying, oh look, this thing happens to this kid at time A and then there's this adult outcome at time B. Therefore A causes B. Right? And any behavior geneticists will know. No, there might have been underlying genetic predispositions that both, you know, caused A and B. It's not necessarily environmental, but, but it's still the case. And most, behavioral sciences. that people think, oh, if we do a longitudinal study across time, that we can infer causality and we can ignore genes, which I think is scientifically unconscionable. And yet, it's really quite difficult, still to get grant money to do serious genetically informative studies.

It's gratifying to hear an expert who knows far more than me agreeing with what I've been saying for years. 

They discuss the lack of measurable use of a college education in many fields.

Geoffrey Miller: Yeah, I think the, the crucial thing is both in the US and you know, the UK and Europe and China, you have very strong vested interests like the educational establishment, that wants to convince everybody that, going to school and doing homework is the royal road to, intelligence and knowledge and learning.

And that, if you emphasize too much the kind of innateness of some of these traits that it would, it will challenge their funding and their power and their influence in society. And I think this is also, you know, a lot of the opposition in America by the teachers’ unions against standardized testing is, they rightly perceive it as, a threat to their influence, but also a threat to, how much people are willing to pay for educational credentials, right?

Because look, if you had companies like Google just using intelligence tests to select employees instead of, how prestigious is your undergraduate degree, then the pressure to get a prestigious undergraduate degree would drop, and that would hurt enrollment and that would hurt people's ability, you know, people's interest in taking out colossal student loans.

So, higher education in general is extremely strongly opposed to IQ testing, not just for ideological reasons, but there, their economic interests are very threatened by this.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I don't know if you're, Have you ever heard of something called the C L A Collegiate Learning Assessment? (which correlates with the SAT at about 0.90) (Miller had not, but caught on to the concept and what was going to happen immediately)

Miller also talks about Intrasexual competition and polyamory, as I discussed at tedious length in the fall. (Though with music and illustrations!) 

I discussed pick-up artists in 2011, generating one of the longest comment threads ever here, and a very good one. Miller has actually studied some of this formally and wrote a book with one of the more famous popular theorisers, Tucker Max. His current take is that the phenomenon describes the change from meeting women at work, school, church, organised groups to meeting in bars and applies mostly to that.  That world is already outmoded, replaced by the dating apps, which have their own rules and strategies.

They also discuss not only how much better GPT-3 is than Google, but also AI alignment, and the naivete of the AI advocates who think that will be simple and work itself out on its own.  Any day now. Miller thinks we should pause for a couple of centuries before proceeding, but knows that won't happen.

I should mention that there are a couple of places where I disagree with Miller quite a bit - he has something of that OCD/Aspie quality of taking a theoretical idea and pushing it beyond practical observable results, much more related to his feelings on the matter than he recognis es, rather than data he can point to.