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Comment by skim_milk | Hacker News Reader

I've been following the state of affairs ever since the very first GWAS on humans was published not too long ago.

The studies were a little shocking at first, but really it's more surprising to me how much neurotic anxiety people have over the valuable insights in these studies. Insights that, by the way, were first discovered by cavemen in India 10,000 years ago and used it to build the first successful societies by distributing labor fairly based on these exact same brain/body types that just some guy found running a k-means on genomes and MMPI-2 answers. And these societies were pretty successful until they were taken over by people that didn't get it.

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Cavemen in India came up with phrenology?

They discovered that the population is quite diverse but that means everyone has a role in society, and that society couldn't possibly function without the psychological and physical diversity of our species.

You make it sound like that role is predefined by just body type and mind type, it totally ignores environment

Casteism and racism: bffs

That would be a British invention.

Indian castes were a British invention?

I too did not realize the caste system was strengthened by the British until the past few weeks. I've only read brief descriptions.

One such is here: https://u.osu.edu/cs1100sp21fechtel/2021/02/05/context-resea...

thanks

In this context I'm one of those neurotic angsties you mentioned. Biological determinism and categorical thinking of many sorts really get my goat. Maybe I need to recalibrate my sniffer but I thought I caught some whiffs of this stuff in your first comment.

As a "mutt" with some German ancestry, some Jewish ancestry, some colonizer ancestors, some colonized ancestors, some who fled, some who dominated, I've thought long and hard about these topics, about what happened last century. I'm neurotic for good reason. Because there's danger here, especially in being overly confident about any single totalizing framework.

I've been told I shouldn't dance because of how I look. But then when I kept dancing anyway, others affirmed me and my rhythm. Who was right?

Guess I can relate to this guy: https://youtu.be/XGMIEDlOT_I

The omnigenic model suggests that even when there are observable genetic associations, they're probably very dynamic.

Who among us has the wisdom and authority to tell an individual exactly where they belong, where they fit, how they fit, what path to choose? A brand new individual whose genetic combinations and environmental context have never been seen before? A whole new being in an ever-emerging world?

Especially in times of upheaval and shifts I believe we need to keep our minds and hearts open.

I agree with you that new tools could provide insight and benefit, but there's ridiculous potential for abuse, for rationalizing and normalizing collective habits of domination old and new, for reinforcement of stereotypes and limiting beliefs.

> categorical thinking of many sorts really get my goat

This also makes my blood boil, should we share so much in common somehow.

Race (still) has nothing to do with any of the GWAS studies, and this has been discussed in length since far before we started hooking up supercomputers to personality studies. These are discussing large differences in the chemical computers in our body that take possibly 100's of times or more longer to evolve than the amount of melanin in your skin or the shape of your nose would have evolved, and have evidently stayed that way for several 100's of thousands of years due to assortative mating.

So, given how literally every society ever tested all the way down to remote African tribes has all this exact same genetic diversity, would it not imply that this exact same distributed diversity is necessary for a healthy society to function?

Is it too difficult to imagine that certain groups of people, who we can't just use our eyes to pick out, are at greater risk from, say, macroeconomic shifts, which hampers their ability to be efficacious and extract favorable outcomes from the environment, has consequences even to certain groups that have it good?

Seems unbelievably great that we have all the data to prove all these emotionally dysregulated and life-hating schizoid racists wrong and be able to better labor distribution to improve individual and societal efficacy, but some anxieties are holding it back?

Here's an idea, you can easily prove the genetic determinism believers wrong by maintaining healthy boundaries and not internalizing other people's own self-destructive issues >:)

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