Emil Kirkegaard blogged about me?

It's true! Wow, this is a weird feeling to be in the spotlight like this, even if only to a relatively small extent (which this clearly is). Anyway, some background is in order: I submitted a paper to one of Kirkegaard's journals last year despite not agreeing with him on many controversial issues only to later decide to withdraw it while it was still being "reviewed" on one of their open "peer-review" forums (by reviewers who often have little/no relevant expertise). Anyway, this is about a post I recently made on reddit from a subreddit from which I have since been banned (namely, /r/heredity).

Basically I was reiterating arguments I considered to be compelling that I came across in Misbehaving Science, a 2014 book by Aaron Panofsky. I bought this book online through Amazon and finished reading it last summer. The arguments I was outlining were that behavior genetics  (BG) researchers, when responding to their critics, tend to focus on relatively narrow statistical and empirical issues, rather than more fundamental, and thus important, underlying theoretical/conceptual problems. In doing so I was also trying to draw attention to arguments made by one prominent critic of the common genetic-deterministic interpretation of heritability coefficients, Peter Taylor, in this paper. I had noticed that others on this subreddit had been citing the work of Neven Sesardic to defend heritability and the way the concept is often used in the BG field. With this background established, I will quote from Kirkegaard's post:

"There’s a certain type of person that doesn’t produce any empirical contribution to “Reducing the heredity-environment uncertainty”. Instead, they contribute various theoretical arguments which they take to undermine the empirical data others give. Usually, these people have a background in philosophy or some other theoretical field. A recent example of this pattern is seen on Reddit, where Jinkinson Payne Smith (u/EverymorningWP) made this thread:

And then he quotes from the post I made that I was describing above. Honestly almost as surprising as him blogging about me is the fact that he knows my middle name. I must have posted it somewhere--I know it's on this blog, I guess some other places (Wikipedia, I think).

Here is what he says after quoting my post: "So: It works in practice, but does it work in (my) theory? These philosophy arguments are useless. Any physics professor knows this well because they get a lot of emails allegedly refuting relativity and quantum mechanics using thought experiments and logical arguments (like Time Cube). These arguments convince no one, even if one can’t find the error in the argument immediately (like in the ontological argument). It works the same way for these anti-behavioral genetics theoretical arguments. If these want to be taken seriously, they should produce 1) contrasting models, 2) that produce empirically testable predictions, and 3) show that these fit with their model and do not fit with the current behavioral/quantitative genetics models.

And then he calls me out by name! Specifically, he does so in the last paragraph of his post, which I have copied and pasted verbatim below:

"I must say that I do feel some sympathy with Jinkinson’s approach. I am myself somewhat of a verbal tilt person who used to study philosophy (for bachelor degree), and who used to engage in some of these ‘my a priori argument beats your data’ type arguments. I eventually wised up, I probably owe some of this to my years of drinking together with the good physicists at Aarhus University, who do not care so much for such empirically void arguments."

For a while I have been looking at many of the BG researchers focusing on genetics, race, IQ, etc. and I have suspected that they seem to really get off on using the word "empirical". This perception has only been bolstered by not only Kirkegaard himself, but also by many other people with whom I have been arguing about these topics on Reddit, as well as other articles I have read in the peer-reviewed BG literature.

One more thing: the point Kirkegaard made in the immediately above paragraph is reminiscent of a point someone else made on the same Reddit post that started all this. I don't remember who, but someone (maybe Kirkegaard himself) did mention physics and arguing that people can come up with silly theoretical concepts/thought experiments that seem to refute well-established theories in physics, but which collapse upon empirical scrutiny. Not knowing much of anything about physics, I am not going to dispute this point except to say that theoretical concerns are not necessarily invalid, nor are they necessarily trumped or refuted by statistics. Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that statistics or empirical evidence is not necessarily meaningful; it must be interpreted in a way that accurately reflects the underlying processes at work in what is being studied.