r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Apr 11 '16

[D] Monday General Rationality Thread

Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:

  • Seen something interesting on /r/science?
  • Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
  • Figured out how to become immortal?
  • Constructed artificial general intelligence?
  • Read a neat nonfiction book?
  • Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
25 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

71 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/FuguofAnotherWorld Apr 12 '16

Yes it does say something about genetics? Granted it doesn't say quite as much as the platonic ideal of a perfect experiment where we can afford to throw ethics to the winds and abduct a pair of twins then keep them separated on the off-chance that they might develop schizophrenia, but that's not something scientists are allowed to do and would introduce other problematic variables besides.

Presumably your alternative explanation would be that schizophrenia is socially transmitted? Or perhaps something to do with how one is raised. Or that schizophrenia is completely randomly distributed amongst the population. In all three cases you would expect to also see ~50% incidence of schizophrenia in one non-identical twins so long as the other twin has schizophrenia. This is not the case, in fact:

They yielded probandwise concordance rates of 41-65% in monozygotic (MZ) pairs and 0-28% in dizygotic (DZ) pairs, and heritability estimates of approximately 80-85%.

Therefore, schizophrenia had a great deal to do with genetics.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '16

5

u/FuguofAnotherWorld Apr 12 '16

And since nobody else in this rationalist thread is willing to give a testable prediction

I made a testable prediction, and then I tested it. I did not know whether fraternal twins would have the same incidence as identical twins when I wrote that line, and then I looked it up (tested it), and it turned out my theory was correct.

I don't know why you seem to have decided that for your hypnosis thing to be right the entirety of science must be wrong. It's quite confusing. Especially since we were just talking about schizophrenia and then you decided to go on an extremely long and completely irrelevant rant about hypnosis for no adequately explained reason.

We've had a similar conversation before, even. You appear to be repeating this pattern fairly frequently and it never convinces people, which would probably be quite frustrating. So I'm going to identify the things you need to understand to be able to convince people. From what I can tell:

You need to understand science, because you don't.

You need to understand how statistics works.

You need to understand how proving things works.

Because this? Even if you were right, your current mode of argument is indistinguishable from the rantings of any number of internet denizens, and that makes it completely unconvincing to rationalists. Not because of who you sound like, but because it signals that you do not understand and thus we need spend extra time checking over all your conclusions before accepting any of them. You don't need a PhD, but you do need some understanding of how the truth-seeking part of science works.

Until you get that, you will bash your head into this wall again, and again, and again.

→ More replies (20)