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Comment by foxbarrington | Hacker News Reader

Personality is ~70% determined by genetics, not life experience.[0]

I’m surprised that someone interested enough in the topic to write such a long post wouldn’t put the time in to do a cursory dive into personality psychology. I’m going to assume that the author has a similar definition of personality to mainstream psychology, but if so, they are ignoring accepted studies and evidence that make it pretty clear that personality is not learned through conditioning like AI.

0: https://www.themantic-education.com/ibpsych/2019/02/11/key-s...

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There's no practical point in separating genetics from life experience, as they go hand in hand together.

Someone who has the genetics to be physically attractive/beautiful will have a completely different set of experiences than someone who isn't. Same goes for intelligence.

Also, the source you linked only pertains to IQ (which itself is not a perfect measure of intelligence), and IQ is not personality (although I have met some folks who do treat their IQ as a substitute for such).

From the link:

Results

The analysis of the data revealed no significant difference between MZA twins (reared apart) and MZT twins (reared together) in regards to personality measures such as temperament, hobbies, interests, career pursuits or social attitudes.

This is noted and considered out of scope: >Obviously some traits are more genetic, and thus inherent, than others, but that is not the scope of this post as even highly-heritable traits will result in a large distribution of outcomes.

Sure, and they even go on to say that the article is about “what helps to explain the differences in outcome between two genetically identical people.” However it’s clear that is not actually what the article is about and they do talk about traits that are highly heritable and not shown to be dependent on environment and life experience.

That’s not a good summary of what twin studies show. For a more sophisticated discussion:

https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/book-review-eric-tur...

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