Not really. A century ago people in many parts of the USA were dirt poor. I mean no savings, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. But they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted themselves. They had deep communal bonds, spiritual fulfillment, and a sense of meaning in their lives that is increasingly absent. I wouldn’t be surprised if your average sharecropper’s wife would blow away your average urban girl boss in self reported happiness.
Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely. But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.
I'm sorry, but perhaps it wasn't clear from context that I'm talking about the USA. There has never been a wide scale famine in the United States even in its poorest communities. Even during the Great Depression there were virtually no deaths due to starvation[1].
> But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.
Your goalpost-moving notwithstanding, I'm reminded of that famous Sufi tale with the refrain "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?" After all the environmental impacts of the population explosion that it kicked off are still just barely beginning to be felt. But for what it's worth the Green Revolution was part of the standard curriculum when I was in middle and secondary school, so I wouldn't say it's unrecognized.
[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12297/how-many-p...
Filtering your sense of happiness through some quality of life lens is absurd if you think about it.
But that’s observably false. There are persons who don’t feel pain, and they are considerably more likely to seriously injure or even maim themselves than normal persons. That’s hardly “objectively better.”
Furthermore, the existence of masochism shows that some people prefer pain to its absence at least some of the time. Thus “Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better” is just your subjective opinion.
Since we’re talking about subjective reports regardless, we may as well rely on the subjective reports of the people having the experiences rather than the subjective opinions of others who aren’t having the experiences.
If you are arguing for #1, I disagree. If you are arguing for #2, you should be more clear about why/how you keep using the word "objectively".
I would guess that each person has a different ideal level and variety of suffering (or responsibility, or challenge, or whatever you want to call it), for which their personality is best suited. We are so far removed from the challenges of the past that we don't know what the subjective experience would be like.
In a good year they might eat well. In a drought year, maybe not at all.
[1] https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/media/sharecropper-family...
We take obviously mostly-genetically-determined traits like height, eye/hair/skin colour, facial features etc, then extrapolate to argue/assume that all kinds of other things must also be genetically determined, like cognition, behavioral patterns, emotional patterns, for which there is far less evidence of them being hard-coded in DNA. This will be confounded by the fact that we can often see commonalities in these factors from parents to children and between siblings, and assume these commonalities exist due to genetic coding, not recognizing that there are other forms of inheritance/conditioning that can explain these commonalities, but that even if these inherited patterns are deeply ingrained, they can be altered via the right practices (emotional “letting go” being the most important in my experience).
Here's a random study on criminality I was looking at a bit ago: https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/frisell2010.pdf
DNA just encodes proteins. It can’t explain/predict detailed behavioral patterns. A prominent example of how genetics can influence aggressive/criminal behavior is due to variations in the MAOA (“Warrior”) gene, but the promotion/suppression of this gene is still strongly influenced by environmental factors [1].
Twin studies (particularly separated twin studies) claim to prove that all kinds of things are genetically encoded, because “they must be”, without considering how much is caused/influenced by other factors - the gestational environment and the experience of being separated from the birth family being the most obvious.
That’s not to say these behavioral patterns aren’t deeply ingrained and difficult/slow to change, but that’s very different from being hard-coded in DNA and impossible to change. For n=1 anecdata, I’ve significantly reduced my aggressive tendencies after years of growth work.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3469457/#:~:tex....
(Also, did you check out the paper I linked?)
I’m fine to have a discussion if your intention is to achieve a shared understanding of the topic, which is what healthy debating is about and what this site seeks to cultivate (even if it rarely achieves it). It does seem a little like you’re more interested in “winning” an argument for a position you’re already invested in, but I’m happy to be shown otherwise and to engage in a discussion if you bring a spirit of shared learning to it.
Edit: rather than doing it here (in a thread that is already very long and stale) you can email me if you like (address in bio).
(Identical twins are close to a natural experiment but not a very good one as even they don't have the same genetics.)
This is a far stronger claim than I think you mean. We have a ton of evidence that those bits of DNA in our cells govern cell expression and even know in some cases that bit X being malformed causes bad condition Y (sure, you could hypothesize that they both have a common cause, but how the heck would that work? Correlation being causation works if both common cause and backwards causation are implausible, as they are often in genetics).
> but not a very good one as even they don't have the same genetics
Uhhh... they have almost exactly the same genetics. To a similar extent that two random cells from your body will have the same genetics. Yes, there will be a handful of mutations, but that's very unlikely to have an effect on any particular trait.
If you have to limit it to "humans only", the claim falls apart anyways, because genetics isn't human-specific
Simply put, you haven't made a convincing case that genetics, a science affecting all life, not just humans, is "not a credible science", despite indeed involving experiments all the time.
Below is where you can make that case.
Height is not genetically determined unless you add "in an environment where nothing else that affects it happens". Like, say, someone cutting off your legs.
And the same goes for every other trait.
But you should be clearer than that about what your theory of causation is.
And puberty blockers, pituitary gland diseases, and lack of sleep.
…and cutting your legs off.
> Assuming the same nutrition, certain ethnicities will trend taller than others.
See, one thing about statistics is they're not necessarily valid for individuals, because eg not all statistical distributions have any values at their averages.
Or maybe it was always mostly BS and the information age where the message is less controlled/manipulated by a few elite owned sources is making that obvious.