Why aren't you allowed to discuss it?
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...