Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies
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Now i see catch myself doing the same thing. I even got into trouble at work for it.
I’m 40 and since 4 years, my solution is to recluse myself and meet as few people as I can, with people who get over my defect.
I must be able to do something about it, but it requires tremendous effort. Basically I have to try to remain silent and innocuous as much as I can, and guess people. It’s hell.
Life's too short to waste on those who don't appreciate you. :)
The idea that personality is heritable is, to me, not farfetched at all.
My son is 11, I'll get to see if he does the same within a few years.
The far more interesting study to me is how much genetics can be overcome due to harsh circumstances.
Would genetics lead to some personality disorder that are common in a family, and would that lead to similar personalities? Or would some brain-related genes lead to some forms of personality tendencies?
I would also guess the definition of personality could be rejected by skeptics, since it's very difficult to define how we perceive or measure personality traits. It's scientific, but many would have no problem undermining some aspects of those definitions.
Do you mean they learn by osmosis from their parents? That's a known thing already and it's very obvious.
I wonder if this operates bidirectionally - if parents learn traits from their offspring, maybe to a lesser extent. If you have a group of people that constantly spend time around each other, they all seem to average out their social tendencies over time, to some degree. As children get older and develop more defined characteristics, it's possible this isn't a one-way street.
For the most part, those genes have massive effects on hormone levels during development which has a huge affect on personality. In general this is why the linkage between personality and heredity is so hard to track.
To some extent, yes. "Personality disorders" are caused by a combination of genetic predispositions and behavior. For instance, someone with a high level of sensitivity might learn from their parents and the environment to become anxious.
> I would also guess the definition of personality could be rejected by skeptics
The thing to understand about psychology is that all the lines are arbitrarily drawn, and other cultures have traditionally had other labels than the west does. There's honestly no escape from the arbitrariness of it, but it helps to come up with some sort of system.
If I had to bet on nature vs nurture, I'd place bets on nature. Separated twin studies seem to suggest genes are a strong determiner. And if you've ever met a kid who stubbornly prefers to be introverted or extroverted-- it often has nothing to do with how adults are treating them.
My mom says she had an inkling I would be introverted (like my dad) and my sister would be extraverted (like her) just based on our behavior in the womb. I was very calm and nonreactive, while my sister was a big kicker and very reactive to external stimuli. Those personality traits have indeed persisted through adulthood.
I don't dismiss it entirely, and humans don't really know enough about how the brain works on the mechanical level. The big 5 doesn't look very insightful.
[1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2015/01/double-life#:~:text=That....
We're just now "unlearning" much of this, especially in the social sciences.
In times past, sociology would be the realm of philosophers who would, after careful study (not scientific, just regular human intuition) and reading (so they could 'experience' past events), would come up with a framework of human behavior and then defend it.
I was like my dad when I was a little girl, and I am still like him now in middle age (probably even more so now even than when I was young). Meanwhile, my sister has always been more like our mom.
Kids that grow up upper-class imitate their parent’s approach to work and life in general, giving them an upper-hand.
Many poor kids are very smart and capable but end up imitating bad examples early on, making them handicapped.
One of the best things a disadvantaged kid can get is a good role model. Doesn’t have to be rich…anyone with a stable middle-class life to imitate is enough, compared to questionable characters some imitate (gun-toting rappers for one).
Seems just slightly obvious, though I'm sure the studies are more nuanced than this
If you look at the differences between people who escape poverty and those that don't, you will find major differences in Habits and capability.
If you look at people who drop in social class and those that dont, you will also find differences.
If starting wealth was all that mattered, and human behavior had zero impact, you would see no mobility. I guess one could chalk mobility up to random luck, but this flies in a the face off massive amounts of data correlating performance with outcome.
We have poor financial habits that occasionally hint (I won't go so far as to say that they "threaten") at upending our lifestyle. Just having "more money" doesn't protect. Our habits would, if not kept in check, squander nearly anything. We are, in many ways, our own worst enemies. I've struggled to recognize this my entire adult life.
I think when someone starts speaking as you just have, it has as much to do with social posturing as anything. You have to say that, to show everyone else how special and empathetic you are. You understand the plight of the poor, that it isn't fair and they're "just like anyone else". That if some windfall dropped into their laps, they too would be rich forever, because that's how wealth works. And when you do this, you see everyone clapping and murmuring to each other about how enlightened you are, and you get off on that.
There are better habits. The wealthy tend to have more of them (many more), and the poor never develop those at all. Mostly, I think, because if they have these habits for any length of time, it quickly becomes incorrect to refer to them as poor. These habits can't protect against all misfortunes, but they protect against some and they mitigate the rest. And when you teach people that these things aren't true, you're doing them a disservice. You're robbing them of the one thing that might change their lives. It's both bizarre and cruel.
Yep, it seems like so many people are happy to tell children that their efforts and choices don't matter because everything is luck, and moreover, if they do try, they are a fool.
Cruel and tragic, especially when it comes from people who claim to be helping.
The problem is that this makes it harder to bring people out of poverty, because you're trying to pull them into a situation they're less adapted for. I actually am in favor of simply giving the poor (/everyone) money (e.g. basic income), but even I acknowledge that poverty-formed habits are going to be a barrier in that strategy's effectiveness.
We're not trying to pull rich people into poverty, so the fact that they wouldn't fare well there is moot.
Avoiding death is a pretty strong force for adaptation to new circumstances.
Honestly it's a completely moot point anyway, as I said: nobody is trying to pull rich people into poverty, so it doesn't matter how they'd fare.
I think it goes without saying that it would be a rough transition if you swapped two people. I expect the long term outcome would be better for a rich person swapped into poverty, than if the poor person who stayed.
I think this because they statistically and experientially I think they have more of the skills necessary to escape poverty: education, trades, social coding, ect.
You see this often with immigrants to the US, and is especially pronounced in the works of Raj Chetty and Ran Abramitzky.
When you take someone successful in one country and have them start over poor in another. The immigrants do better over the course of their lives, and the children of poor immigrants do FAR better than the children of native born poor.
https://www.amazon.com/Streets-Gold-Americas-Immigrant-Succe...
Conscientiousness is partially heritable.
The bankruptcy rate for former NFL/NBA/Music superstars and lottery winners is significantly higher than that of trust fund babies.
Make of that what you want.
[0] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...
The ones who go broke fast are usually the ones who also got rich fast, trough luck instead of work or knowledge, like from lottery wins or speculations.
I'm from Europe so my knowledge revolves around local examples.
Some countries have publicly available data on individual income filings. The US provides anonymized data, but scienentist have done a lot of fancy tricks to make the family connections clear.
Raj Chetty among others have done a lot of work on US social mobility[1]. They were able to trend parent/child incomes in the US going back to 1940, and have tons of great insights.
I dont remember all of the findings off the top of my head, but one was that relative social mobility (%s) for the US have been constant over time. Another was that economic mobility out of the bottom classes is dominated by poor immigrants. It is unclear if it is genetic, personality, or culture, but children of poor immigrants out perform native born poor by an enormous factor (2-3X better IIRC)
Income is a completely different thing than wealth and those two are not always directly correlated. You can have a good income but not accumulate much wealth because all is bein eaten away by taxes and a high CoL, and you can also have a low income but still decent wealth from an inheritance for example.
And the original claim was that wealth gets lost between generations by the majority of people which I find dubious.
In practice, if you aren't making income, you losing wealth.
By wealth, people tend to mean assets, not petty cash sitting in checking accounts. If you're sitting on inherited assets you're accumulating more wealth by just sitting on your ass without doing anything.
Just see the post-2009 monetary polices: from housing to stocks, everything went up like crazy, especially during COvid. You didn't have to be financially literate, all you had to do was sit on your inherited assets and not touch them and the government's money printer did the work for you in the last 10+ years.
So forgive me but I still see no proof that 72% people loose their wealth between generations, when everything went up up up in the last decades, especially housing. Unless that wealth we're talking about was an old carpet and $600 bucks in a checking account.
>Physical assets require upkeep and property taxes.
N'ah bruh. Stocks or empty land in desirable areas requires no upkeep and wealth taxes in some EU countries range from laughable to zero, while income taxes in those same countries hover around 50%. Go ahead, tell me more how income is the same thing with wealth.
The vast majority of wealth isn't empty houses, ever rented, and never sold.
the interesting groups are the top .1% and .01%. there isn't that much fluctuation at that layer.
But we also have all those royal families from Europe and the Middle East, dictators like Putin, etc. whos' wealth are secret and very well hidden through crown estates, trusts, shell companies, all through Caribbean off-shores and often under different names. The best you have for those people is guestimations and some leaks from the Panam Papers to get an idea.
however for the 1 in 10_000 you may or may not know people in that tier and for the 1 in 100_000 let alone 1 in 1_000_000 you are close to that tier or part of it to personally know them (in such a way that they know you).
My personal observation is that the 4 generation has so many better options than the family business is holding them back with responsibility and the family unity has broken down through generational grudges.
Kid of a rich person will probably become rich because they inherit cash. Kid of a poor person may become rich because they are ready to take risk and usually have good social skills. That, or they may die trying or end up in prison... But there's no good pathway to become rich if you come from a boring middle-middle-class. Too little money for elite uni or other ways to "hack" it, too little money for risk taking ("starting a startup because you always have something to fall back on"), and inherited attitude against risk-taking. Dead end. You just take up a mediocre white collar job and count years till retirement.
[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/upward-mobility-alive-well-a...
My sister always had a better relationship with her kids and they have way better social skills than me or my sisters.
Examples or mentors can have a huge influence on people, especially when they are young. Some are good, some are bad.
It also provides compelling alternate explanations for things like 'children of abusive parents are more likely to abuse' that you also are not really allowed to discuss nowadays.
It is true that there are serious limitations on what I can or cannot do, but taking action and choosing to cast off the traits of parents that you don’t like or think aren’t productive is possible. You can change and go beyond your upbringing.
You are a product of it, but you can decide to be different, I’m living proof. It’s just hard.
I find the rhetoric when you start touching on things people don't like to be so odd. Suddenly I'm portrayed as having some sort of temper tantrum about heritability or limiting the next generation's capability or whatever.
I think the next generation, like this one, will be fine. My whole point is that you can do things other than your upbringing.
Whatever aura of mystery and suspense this may have once imbued is long gone by now.
Publicly, in academia, generally anywhere?
> What do you want to discuss
The topic at hand? The 'cycles of abuse' thing I mentioned earlier? GWAS with behavioral predictions and their usage in increasing the power of non-genetic behavioral studies? All sorts of things about genetic basis for behavior?
Even the way I'm getting responded to here indicates that people are searching for a 'gotcha' - it would be much worse in actual academia.
I don't really understand the motivation for denying this taboo exists.
The coy “I’m not allowed to talk about this, ooh” act is tiresome.
Stuff like hm, maybe the children of child abusers are likely to abuse children not only because they were raised that way but because of genetic behavioral factors. Or maybe the correlation between test scores and affluence doesn’t mean that test scores are bunk or only measure affluence, but are partially due to heritable confounders and the “affluence bias” isn’t as strong as we think.
The essential point is that there is strong evidence for genetic heritability of behavior.
But regardless, the point of my original comment was to discuss the interesting difference between academic/societal taboos and commonly held intuitions - not to enumerate all the possible taboo things related to this line of research.
One example: in future studies of interventions at reducing child abuse, if we can use genetic factors to explain away some of the variance, then we can better identify interventions that are effective at reducing child abuse that we wouldn't be able to identify otherwise.
> Are you proposing some kind of public policy?
Not in that case that immediately comes to mind, but if we discover some interventions as mentioned above ^ it could be useful. In the case of the test scores affluence one, it might take some (although not all) strength away from some of the arguments for dropping standardized testing.
I think the reason people have a problem with it, is because they think that this knowledge will crush people's motivation to do the work that is necessary to succeed. If your hypothesis turns out to be true, then only people that have innate drive, skill and resources will be able to do the work to succeed. Accepting that theory as true implies that there are also people without the drive, skill and resources and what is to make of them? Are we not all created equal? Should we not have equal opportunities? Should these lower-people be helped? Do they deserve it? Do they "earn" to not earn a lot of money because they are born from the wrong mother? In the past this problem was solved with religion...
By “understand”, you mean “have colloquial theories that we don’t bother trying to falsify”
There is evidence pointing against environmental unicausality. [0][1] Both these and the studies you mention will have trouble disentangling causality because nobody can run ethical experiments.
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266717432... [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6758596/
I’ve preferred studies I’ve seen over the ones with contradict them (usually due to study design and the rigour behind them), but I’ll have to look at yours and reassess.
I think I’ve also leaned towards environmental factors in part because it encourages more prosocial responses if your morality is inclined in that direction. That’s purely subjective, and while not colloquially driven, it isn’t scientific.
I’ll have to think about it. I did feel science was more conclusively in the environmental spectrum of cause in this context, but you’ve got me wondering just how conclusive it could be beyond “seems statistically probable” while never being close to certain. Especially without unethical studies.
I’ll dig up some studies I’ve liked over the years to compare with what you’ve got here.
Of course this warrants a lot of social issues we simply don't want to face, but I always felt we were just trying to make them a tabu to discuss.
My take is that free will is, 90% of the time, a necessary lie. Because if we didn’t believe it, everything would get far far worse.
Why? Would people choose to do bad things because they don't have a choice?
And folks on the fence will hop over it onto that side.
Because consequences do matter for preventing most behavior (weighed by the rational and non-rational part of the mind), but punishing someone for something they can’t control seems cruel - and that will stop many people from applying them. Resulting in more damage and more bad behavior.
So regardless of if it’s true or not, treating it as true is fundamental for a functioning society.
Regarding the second - see my comment.
At least in the western world, most crimes require fault and mens rea. Those require someone being able to make a informed choice, which means having free will. If there is (actually) no choice, or the choice was based on faulty information processing (aka actual insanity), then therefore there is no fault and no mens rea.
The underlying belief (philosophically) is one cannot be good or evil if one cannot comprehend a choice or it's ramifications, or in fact actually effectively choose between options due to a lack of knowledge and independent agency.
Interestingly, this is why the 'original sin' in Christian mythology was eating the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. [https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-0-3....]
So philosophically, before that point, there was no 'good' or 'evil' because humans didn't know of such things, therefore were just acting. Regardless of what they did, they were innocent, because they were incapable of being anything else. After that, everything they did had such knowledge as a factor, and were no longer innocent - because they could choose.
So, for example, if I murder someone in cold blood (aka rational/thinking/choosing), that is 1st degree murder. One of the most serious crimes in any society.
However, if I murder my spouse because I found they betrayed me right in front of me and lose my mind (literally can't think straight, and react instinctively without being able to think or plan anything), most locations will consider me not guilty by reason of insanity, and let me go. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/temporary_insanity]
This is already a great example of the problem, as MANY folks try to claim insanity already after getting caught when they are not actually insane.
Another example is if I accidentally kill someone without knowing such a thing was a possibility. For example, I'm out hunting in the woods. I see a deer, and (as far as I know) legally shoot it. However, it turns out that was actually a human dressed in a very convincing deer costume, and I had no way of knowing this was the case. Most of the time, I would be charged with no crime, or worst case likely negligent homicide.
As per the Supreme Court of Iowa, "In order to be an excuse and defense for a criminal act, the person accused, and who claims [temporary] insanity as a defense, must prove that the crime charged was caused by mental disease or unsoundness which dethroned, overcame, or swayed her reason and judgment with respect to that act, which destroyed her power rationally to comprehend the nature and consequences of that act.”
If we assert that people actually act based on their nature/upbringing and have little to no rational control over their actions in fact (aka no free will), then does it not follow that no one actually has a choice, and therefore it makes no sense to actually punish anyone for anything they do? Since philosophically, without the ability to rationally actually choose their actions, they cannot be good or bad - they just are.
And if we punish people based on who they 'just are', that opens another can of very nasty worms, and likely a lot of serious evil will result.
My understanding is the focus on punitive punishment has been higher than average since roughly the 1970s beginning with the war on drugs and is arguably not working very well measured in incarceration rates (US is #6th worldwide) so a shift seems away from culpability seems like it could potentially be a positive change. That being said like you say it's potentially it's own can of worms overcorrecting the other way.
If a unique situation not likely to reoccur is an defense for criminal behavior, Then this rule provides the unique situation.
Imagine a rule that rehabilitation is the punishment for a first murder. For a rational person, this is a free pass to commit exactly one murder, because as soon as they do, they have every reason to avoid the 2nd and require no rehabilitation for compliance.
Retribution is largely in the eyes of victim, so the need is subjective and depends on their emotional desire for revenge. I'm not convinced that victims will be emotionally satisfied with the explanation of causal chain that goes back to the big bang.
To be honest, I dont really understand how the concept of restitution differs from deterrence and retribution. the cost is a deterrent, and paying it to the victim partially mitigates the desire for revenge.
I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but I think free will is entirely irrelevant to assessments of responsibility, fault, and culpability. Why should it matter if someone is a robot with bad programing, or a puppet animated with a bad spirit. In both case, they a black box which took an action in a given situation.
It seems like the game theory, emotion, and economics around punishment is the same in either case.
Maybe I simply understand the argument/theory why free will is a justification for harsher/additional punishment in the first place.
If someone is a ‘bad puppet’/fundamentally programmed badly, then what choice do we have except to destroy them or ‘rewrite’ their programming?
That is the difference, and a big one - because in the first case, consent is possible and meaningful.
The second one, it is not.
Do you think that rationality is related or equivalent to free will???
I agree that someone's rationality may impact the efficacy of deterrence and Rehabilitation.
Both irrational and the rational would need reprogramming, just by different means. You would try to convince a rational person that it's in their interest to obey if you can. For an irrational person you'd have to use other means. This is basically how it works today.
Where does consent come into all of this? I understand that there maybe a difference in capacity to understand and consent, but not always. Irrational, for example impulsive people, can still consent. Normally consent isn't required for criminal justice to be carried out.
They’re being driven by things they have no choice in, and no way to meaningfully actually control.
When that is happening, they don’t actually have free will.
And this is where my original statement around ‘90% of the time free will is a necessary lie we tell ourselves’.
It’s why emotional manipulation (including advertising and propaganda) is so remarkably effective, and why it is so remarkably prevalent. It works - very well - 90% of the time.
And the reason this matters (philosophically), is because someone isn’t actually consenting (in the medical ethical sense [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent]) if they never had an option to actually make a choice - aka if they have no free will.
In the criminal justice system, that also comes into play with plea bargains, mens rea, sentencing, etc.
It also comes into play with sexual relations. And business. And things like gambling (which we generally excuse by saying ‘they are adults and can make their own decisions’ which presumes actual free will). Depending on who you ask, it comes into play with recreational drugs -or should never apply to recreational drugs.
If people don’t have free will, then all those excuses, rationalizations, justifications, freedom, etc. make no sense.
What actually makes sense in a no-actual-free-will scenario is a state-machine-like series of conditioning/programming responses to produce an expected society and/or individual. At least from a utilitarian perspective.
Which from a philosophical perspective is severely dystopian, if explicitly stated that way, as there is no freedom or actual choice - only fate.
But may legitimately produce more aggregate human happiness. Or more aggregate absolute human misery.
Depending on the goal of the state machine and the actual rules and application in practice.
Retribution and restitution as punishments don't seem justifiable without free will or the ability to have mens rea, but punishments for the sake of deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation still seem reasonable if free will is assumed to not exist. For example incapacitating someone who is clinically insane and dangerous is already considered reasonable, and not on the grounds that they have using free will chosen to be insane.
Changing that would require a complete rethink of core western philosophy IMO.
i fall on strongly on the nurture side of the nature vs nurture question, but the issue is that with the amount of habits and behavior patterns that we acquire, we simply don't have the capacity to change all of them without effort. we can change a few at a time, and each can take considerable effort to change. not to mention many that we are not even aware of.
in short, there is no need to fall back to nature as a reason for why certain behaviors don't change. moreover, even if a certain behavior is nature, i believe willpower can allow us to change that too.
what bothers me is that nature or lack of free will are abused to excuse certain behaviors as unchangeable. everything can be changed, because humans are very adaptable. we just need to carefully consider which things we actually want to change.
You cant 100% predict what a person will do without duplicating the entire person and the world they are interacting with.
Even if everything is causally driven by historic circumstance, it is the human that synthesizes that history and computes an action
In your statement, there is no choice - just a lack of predictability due to unknown starting states.
Individual choice happens if someone believes in an extra-physical soul or not. It happens if you believe in determinism or not.
The question of if someone could have made a different choice is meaningless without an argument for why someone would make have a different choice.
People who do believe in free will make an argument that regardless of the input state, the individual always has a choice what course they take, and is responsible for those decisions.
So for example, if someone chooses to be a concentration camp guard or a capo vs be a prisoner and be murdered - that is their choice, and they are responsible for it.
If free will exists.
It's a rather fundamental philosophical question, actually.
Because those concentration camp guards and capos did pretty evil things, which were also (in their circumstances) often the least 'bad' thing for them. Which enabled evil at a truly massive scale against others because of those other peoples upbringings/genetics.
And those prisoners (most of which had no choice in the matter) mostly ended up dead, and stopped having much of a say in the matter.
This is why it's an important philosophical debate. Because if people play out a script based on their circumstances/upbringing/genetics and have no actual choice in the matter (philosophically), then isn't punishing those guards and capos essentially doing the same thing to them that they did to those prisoners? Hurting them due to factors outside of their (actual) control, even up to murder?
And if we think that upbringing/genetics was a major factor in creating that sort of destructive evil, doesn't that open up the possibility of tracking down and killing/punishing other people based on their upbringing/genetics? Regardless of any individual choices they had made? In this example, other potential concentration camp guards and capos - though it would play out as relatives and those with similar genetic traits and upbringings?
Which then creates the circumstances exactly that was at the root cause of the Holocaust to begin with? Namely, assigning 'goodness' and 'badness' based on some general attribute (ethnicity aka genetics/upbringing, sexual orientation, etc.) that cannot be changed or chosen, and NOT a persons choices (aka did they commit a crime knowing good vs bad)?
My point is that even with free will, you have to have some difference in input to get different output. Normally people invoke metaphysics, but even if you have a soul making the choice, it still has inputs (good soul/bad soul). It is a different object making the choice, but changes nothing about the choice itself.
I think the inside/outside of control argument is arbitrary with respect to responsibility. If you simply look at inputs and output actions, it doesnt matter what goes on the black box. It doesnt matter if it is biology, chemistry, or a soul, you still have a black box that takes inputs and executes an action.
A black box selects an action, no mater the mechanism. The black box is the causal link, independent of "control" or "not".
I'm not a philosophy expert, but this position reminds me consequentialism and Kantian ideas. I think it renders the different positions on free will/choice as distinctions without a difference. Doing something bad because you were programed to it is no better than doing something bad because you chose to.
It doesn't matter if the capos made a choice, were predetermined, or could have done different if they were raised by a loving mother instead.
But that position means all resulting choices are fundamentally due to the inputs, which means there actually is no possibility for a truly independent or ‘free’ choice, no? The outcome was inevitable when the input was fixed, de facto.
That is the crux of the issue.
Notably this debate has been going on as long as we have records, so not like we’re going to ‘solve’ it now.
I dont see how this changes the question of free will from a personal or moral responsibility perspective.
Someone can ascribe no responsibility because actions are just the product of your physical inputs. Similarly, you can ascribe no responsibility because that is how someone's soul is made.
How does someone with free will choose one option and not another? Is it not their character or soul but determines a choice? How could they choose something different without being someone different.
I'm willing to believe that a Choice can't be predetermined or calculated before it happens. What I don't understand is why the choice would ever be different in an identical universe with an identical person making the decision.
This seems to be a paradox of free will. A person has the freedom to choose between options, but choice and will imply this action is based on something, and not purely random. If Free Will choice is based on something, why would the choice be different for the same chooser.
there was no decision that was entirely random yet strongly influencing the future.
however, here is an idea for a possible proof that free will exists: the freedom to believe in god or not. there is nothing in the world or in ones life that can determine that belief. sure, certain experiences can influence that belief, but nothing can determine it. we always have the freedom to either believe or not believe in god. and we can change our mind any time. on the other hand, the choice whether to believe in god or not is able to influence every other choice we make.
Here is a good starting point for getting educated on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...
Of course I'm like my parents. I'm completely made up of their genetic material and for my formative years I spent almost all of my time with them.
I've never considered this to be taboo either, it's bloody obvious. Is there some sort of hidden context here I'm not getting?
Even if you’ve lived like that all the time, if you hated it, you’d expect someone to do the opposite.
There is. So the problem comes in when you start looking at something like say a particular minority racial/ethnic group and then picking some statistic that is higher or lower than the average over all people and associating that statistic with bad outcomes like violent offenses, lack of conscientousness/underachievement, etc. So for example, if you're saying that violent offenses can be attributed to heritable personality traits (rather than environmental/circumstantial) in those groups of people, you're basically right back to the old and not-so-old eugenic and racist arguments about human behavior.
It's likely that there is some effect there, but the question is to what extent is that useful information in terms of education/discussion or setting policy goals and stuff. Also, there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot. (It's not hard to imagine that the same personality trait that tends to produce aggression could manifest VERY differently for someone raised in an environment where physical violence was common and necessary to survive, vs someone upper middle class, or someone in the CEO private-school class of people.)
There are much simpler, much more solid mechanistically scientifically associations that are still taboo to discuss that imo have nothing to do with race (race isn't even a real thing).
For instance, a common argument I hear is that "standardized tests are just testing affluence" because the correlation between parental income and standardized test performance is so high. It seems pretty obvious to me that there are potential heritable confounders there, but I would never feel comfortable discussing this publicly.
It's also frustrating because people will strongly implicitly weight the evidence by what they want to be true. Anything contrary to what they want to be true gets much stricter scrutiny than the reverse. For instance, "there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot" is simply not an accurate statement of the science. Measurable environmental factors don't explain even remotely close to everything. A lot (or all of the remaining) could just be random variance, but the idea that there just isn't much variance left to explain otherwise is absurdly wrong but people want it to be true.
For what it's worth, I'm totally on your side, but I was only trying to illustrate the problems with going down that line of thinking, and why some consider it taboo.
There are some deep problems in the social sciences right now. The fact that some feel reluctant to discuss things they believe to be true is a bad thing in my opinion because it eliminates the opportunity for counter-arguments to be made and considered.
I also think that the arguments on how standardized tests merely test affluence are terrible, and sometimes I feel that actually these arguments are surreptitious ways of ensuring that affluent kids get to still go to school, even if they wouldn't quite do well enough on the exams. The idea that SAT training is a profound effect is a bad one. Studying and prep will improve scores, but not by as much as people seem to think.
The correlation coefficient is not a measure of correlation, but of co-linearity, and coefficients < 0.5 are typically bunk, and the entire system of computing correlation coefficients is bunk if the data is nonlinear. Almost all interesting phenomena outside are non-linear, esp. biology and higher, where nonlinearities arise from the mutual interaction of parts of the system. Here, the correlation coefficients are in the ~0.2 range. You might as well be staring at monkey entrials.
Methodologically, you cannot construct explanatory models of weak-effect non-linear phenomena from observational data. Basically, you can fit any explanatory model you like, since you can make any parts of the system interact with any strength, and since they are non-linear, this will reproduce any distribution you so wish.
You can entirely reproduce any heritability distribution, genetic covariance, "shared" parent-child, "unshared" child-child, etc. you want by changing this model. Observational data here is basically useless at discriminating. ie., i can make a model where genes are 100% irrelevant, or 100% determinative, entirely consistent with the observational data.
The only method which can distinguish here is interventional, ie., you have to actually control the causes of the system. However, since we cannot breed different groups with different genes; nor take the same person and run their life with differnet parents, friends, etc. you're basically out of luck.
I'd prefer we closed this whole field down, and any person mentioning "heritability" outside of a wheat breeding lab, shuffled off to some discipline less catastrophically detrimental to social policy.
If I google those topics, I don't know if I'll find anything relating to a criticism of this field.
But if you want a general criticism of these academic linear methods of observational analysis: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488
He's quite a bad communicator; that happened to be written by students attending his lecture.
Nobody who is in the know and actually is skeptical of this branch of work (ie. people like Sasha Gusev) thinks it is as useless as you are making it out to be.
Adoption studies produce causality and even the GWAS (genome-wide association studies) stuff, while not necessarily causal, is pretty interesting.
re Sasha Gusev: disease, to some degree, can be studied with these methods if you have interventional evidence of a genetic cause.
But since all non-genetic factors are almost obviously mutually interacting, with "compound interest", no explanatory model can be fit.
eg., suppose your personality is entirely genetic: then why variation? Well, because of gene-environment interactions.
eg., suppose your personality is 0% genetic: when why genetic co-variation? Because people's genes covary geographically, and due to the trait selection of partners... ie., families live in the same geography, and people of similar traits breed together.
Why (very weak) correlation with genetic similarity? Because "compound interest" applies to the interacting factors, so even extremely weak geographical selection will compound.
It is entirely unclear to me how you're meant to discriminate between teh infinite family of models on either side.
Certainly, with correlation coefficients of ~.2, you're talking about pseudoscience either way. The causes would have to be extremely linear for such trivial correlations to mean anything at all, and they certainly arent.
Your rhetoric does not match the strength of your scientific objection. Let's imagine the worst case - these studies are absolutely useless for indicating any causality whatsoever. Even then, they are still extremely useful because they can explain away lots of environmental variation in a behavior of interest and increase the power of studies of human behavior. That's if they are purely non-causal and genetics actually has no impact whatsoever on behavior or the brain (a mechanistic stretch).
Sorry, but this simply does not match your rhetoric of 'pseudoscience' and closing entire fields down.
> Certainly, with correlation coefficients of ~.2, you're talking about pseudoscience either way. The causes would have to be extremely linear for such trivial correlations to mean anything at all, and they certainly arent.
I simply don't agree, but I can tell you won't be convinced on this point.
There's a cost to the latter when we know, a priori, that the "scientists" prior belief about what models to use are the most significant factor determining the conclusions of the paper; and that we know that the data is vastly too weak to distinguish between priors.
Compare the same problem in finance: this sort of linear easy-predictability thinking was a major factor in the financial crash of 2008; and it's something now widely seen with great suspicion amongst the financial industry.. who are well aware that "crisis" and "saftey" are both consistent with observational data.
I would argue that we live in a world of "pseudo-scientific social science disasters", the entire industry of measuring people and classifying them is one big Science Crisis whose effects practitioners do not care about because they aren't the ones being fired and loosing all their money (or have rigged these measures to benefit themselves).
Against this backdrop of, what ought be, researchers "going bust", universities collapsing, and research paper stock prices near zero -- i'd claim "pseudoscience" is a polite word. Esp. when those who should be long bust are still publishing papers immune from their effects on society.
thank you for this way of putting it. made my day.
Why? The covariance of genes with accent is near 100%: almost everyone who speaks scottish interbreeds within the same geographical area.
As for eyes: there is almost no variation in the species between the number of eyes. Since ~everyone has 2, no genetic variation whatsoever discriminates.
The co-variation of a gene with an observable trait is irrelevant when vast amounts of cultural (, geographical, social, etc.) traits cause (irrelevant) genetic variation. So "heritability" is basically nonsense outside of cases when the experimenter is actually causing genes to differer between populations (it was invented for the case of engineering crops).
It's a practically useless concept outside of extremely narrow fields of biology, where you can control causes or otherwise eliminate genetic variation.
In the vast majority of cases where people use 'heritability', it is useless. Knowing how much a trait varies, or fails to vary, with genes tells you nothing about whether its inherited.
Under stable genetic equilibrium near universally inherited traits will have a heritability of zero; and under cultural, social, geographical etc. selection of mates, 0% inherited traits will be arbitrarily close to 100% heritability.
It's a statistics designed for cases where the experimenter is actually controlling the genetic variance (ie., breeding plants) across populations; it's otherwise meaningless.
Consider a security guard who forces all past shoplifters to wear a tag. Under such an induced causal relationship, wearing a red tag becomes predictive of future criminal behaviour. Otherwise, it's useless.
Likewise, when an experimenter is inducing genetic varience, then it becomes explanatory and predictive; otherwise, it's useless.
> Knowing how much a trait varies, or fails to vary, with genes tells you nothing about whether its inherited.
I am not sure what this is trying to convey. Because I think there's clear cases where stuff is inheritable, and clear cases where stuff isn't, and that's a very meaningful distinction to make from a sociological perspective.
For eg. consider skin color and accent. The former is fully inheritable, the latter is completely uninhabitable.
A Scottish kid raised by Africa foster parents in Nigeria will still look like his biological parents and have their skin complexion, while he will sound entirely like how people sound in Nigeria.
One would be an idiot for trying to force him to have darker skin, or to have a Scottish accent, because we understand that one is genetically controlled, and the other is socially / culturally controlled.
Now in these cases it was as absolute as you can get with these things. But can we not imagine that there's an aspect of genetic influence on many other aspects that can also be somewhat affected culturally?
I don't care what we call it, but can we at least agree that this distinction can exist and might be sociologically salient?
isn't saying that someone's character is inherited from their parents such a claim?
For eg. if you have dark skinned parents, you are likely to be dark skinned yourself.
So 'skin color' is a trait that is being claimed to have heritability.
Of course a scottish accent isnt inheritable. The point is that the heritability statistic is near 100%.
There is no statistics for inheritability. We have no idea, in general, what is inheritable and what isnt. It requires the kinds of experiments which are practically impossible or unethical.
Heritability doesnt mean inheritability. A trait is "heritable" only if it varies with the genes of some population, so a scottish accent is nearly 100% heritable.
Heritability was a statistic invented for when the experimenter was in control of what genes were in what population (for breeding plants). It is meaningless when genes arent being controlled.
Heritability is the idea that if you control which plant has which gene, and the plants are different, then it's probably because of the gene. But its applied to cases where no one is in control of the gene, so it's meaningless.
When I said scottish accents are nearly 100% heritable, that's correct, as a matter of fact. If you compute the heritability stat for scottish accents it'd be nearly 100%.
Isn't that just an example of poor sampling/ test hypothesis? Heritability of eyes should be 100% (as predicted) if you include people with genetic blindness.
There obviously are genes for eyes, and they have a causal relationship with humans having eyes. They may have many variations that produce working eyes, but that doesnt mean the relation isnt causal.
Maybe i miss how this relates to your greater point that genetic associations are just coincidental, not causal.
Seems easy enough to test for the case of genetic intelligence. If you find a subset of genes within genetically diverse populations that cross culture, geography, and societies, then you would need a very strong rationale for coincidental association.