Comment by j9461701 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j9461701 | Hacker News Reader

>Psychologists and biologists currently regard the controversy as outdated, and speak of the interaction between genes and environment.

As examined at length by Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, they regard the controversy as outdated because nature won. Definitely. We've found even enviroment itself is heavily impacted by genetics, as people tend to strongly self-select what kind of day-to-day conditions they live in.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/

>Shockley, by advocating such genetic-determinist views on race and intelligence, seemed like an atavistic throwback, to a time in America’s history when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Jewish immigrants) were screened out because of their alleged intellectual inferiority to the superior Nordic races.

Considering the Manhattan project had so many Eastern European jews involved it was joking referred to as a "Hungarian high school science fair project" this seems unlikely. But it wouldn't be the first time a racist ostensibly interested only in 'the biology of intelligence' conspicuously ignored the Jewish community's intellectual accomplishments.

"Shockley, by advocating such genetic-determinist views on race and intelligence, seemed like an atavistic throwback, to a time in America’s history when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Jewish immigrants) were screened out because of their alleged intellectual inferiority to the superior Nordic races."

I think it shows how easy is it to misapply the idea of genetic (or natural) origin of intelligence.

Jews were regarded as inferior in intelligence despite the fact that there is an actual evidence that they are not.

I believe that some humans simply want to be xenophobes, and the actual reality doesn't matter for the categorization.

In any case, I find the characters like Shockley to be very interesting. Apparently, they want to change society for the better but somehow "forget" that people have agency; the reason why to change society should always come from the wishes of individuals.

There is an element of psychopath here, regarding people as things, trying to arrange them (the society) so that it follows certain pattern that is pleasant to the eye of the person who wants to arrange it. And this is not tied to any particular ideology. Plato, Ayn Rand, Lenin, Shockley.. they all wanted a very similar thing.

I certainly agree with the top half of your post but I believe the bottom is mischaracterizing Rand. As far as I know she did not wish to form a violent authoritarian state a la Lenin to "plan" society into a certain pattern. She seemed to think her desires would, when enough constraints on reasoned self-interest were removed, realize themselves through individual action. And she certainly did not forget that individuals have agency; on the contrary, Objectivism relies on individual self-interest to the intentional exclusion of pretty much all else.

Ah, I see, perhaps I am being unfair to her.

I deliberately omitted Marx from the list for a reason - by your description, his views were somewhat similar to Rand, not prescriptive, but descriptive. That is, if we just stop meddling with the human nature, we will arrive at society that looks like <whatever they wrote about>.

Unfortunately, neither in Marx's or Rand's case, this is not what will happen. Both are utopian.

But yeah, in my post, I should have probably used somebody who is more prescriptive of the society based on selfishness than Rand. I think somebody like Hayek would likely fit the bill better.

Rand was vehemently opposed socialist programs but she ended up collecting social security benefits..

If the government offers you a rebate of prior taxes paid, it's rational and in your self interest to accept it, even if you do not think the program providing it should exist.

Absolutely, but seems very hypocritical she was so vehemently against any such programs, against paying taxes, against all that until she got into a different position when she needed it, and she accepted it. No words on changing her mind one iota on her philosophy of selfishness.

> As examined at length by Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, they regard the controversy as outdated because nature won. Definitely.

How is this supported by your link, whose second bullet point is "No traits are 100% heritable"?

I am not OP, but I guess it's a question of degree..

The reason why this is so controversial is that some people (not necessarily biologists) wanted nature to support the moral systems that are based on equality among people. So they didn't want the nature to have a significant effect.

But the effect of the nature is significant. In this sense, this argument was lost.

It's kind of natural that we want to tie our moral system to some objective, well, nature; for the sake of argument. I don't think it's generally tenable, but I do it myself in certain sense, too. People who argue with god often do it, too, by claiming there is some objective moral system that this god wants.

Another example, from the opposite (liberal) camp, is claiming that being gay is unchangeable for biological reasons. We want nature to support our (I am a liberal too, in fact) moral wish that gays shouldn't be discriminated. And if it was true that being gay is unchangeable, you cannot so easily dismiss the behavior as immoral.

So yeah, in that sense the nature won - it didn't let to lend itself to any ideology, however likable it might have been.

The state of the field previously was anyone could be anything in the right enviroment. For example the following quote from John B. Watson:

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."

For many years this blank slate view predominated, on every topic of human nature. Leading to some tragic results occasionally, such as the case of David Reimer in which attempts to socialize him as a girl after a botched circumcision against his will likely contributed to his suicide.

Eventually the evidence became overwhelming that this view was faulty. But more than that, the wishy washy "everything is nature and nurture all mixing together" fallback position was although not explicitly wrong profoundly disingenuous. Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes, with a minority contribution from enviroment and parents and schooling. Nature won the debate, as profoundly as it was ever possible to win it, and it annoys me seeing equivocation in the discussion of the matter.

Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes

Well, that doesn't sound right either. It's not easy to put what is correct in a nutshell, I think. Your annoyance with everyone who doesn't agree with your understanding seems unreasonable. For one thing, if what the people who annoy you write is almost entirely determined by their genes, why be angry about that?

I'm no expert; I should rewatch Robert Sapolsky's excellent 25-part lecture series on the biology of human behavior[0], which covers this question in depth from a number of perspectives. It's by a long way the best lecture series I've seen.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL150326949...

Unless you can predict individual outcomes based on genes, I think it will remain as speculation to me. No evidence however strong can be counted as causal unless it can be shown to model unknown outcomes to a fair degree of accuracy. If there's such work, I would like to know more.

> Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes, with a minority contribution from enviroment and parents and schooling. Nature won the debate

It would be more precise to say that maximum potential is largely genetic. Watson was wrong in that sense, but right in the opposite sense: an extremely bad environment - malnutrition, disease, pollution, very poor or no education, and so on - can definitely prevent someone from reaching their genetic potential. Unfortunately, an extremely good environment does not seem to reliably eliminate a genetic ceiling (for want of a better term) to a similar extent.

An extremely good environment takes away any sort of existential risk in your endeavour of life, therefore reducing one’s ability to ever take any sorts of risks.

In simple words, being born in a lab environment makes one adapted to that lab environment.

> Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes, with a minority contribution from enviroment and parents and schooling

So I would have still become a computer programmer with multiple graduate degrees had I been born to a tribe in the Amazon jungle? The power of the genetic code is truly amazing.

I think your position is at least as unreasonable as the "blank slate" position.

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