Hacker News Reader

Comment by pendenthistory | Hacker News Reader

I trust my own observations and my conclusion is that heritability is very strong. This is not a view that was imparted on me, quite the opposite. Growing up in a western country I was led to believe we are all blank slates, and I truly believed it. Once I started spending more time around the opposite sex some doubts started to emerge. Once I became a parent it became very apparent that this ideology had no basis in reality. Kids come with a personality, batteries included, and it's very easy to point out even individual behaviors that originate with either parent. Boys and girls are also very different on average. It's insane that we have somehow convinced ourselves that this is not the case, and I will surely be attacked by just pointing this out. I don't need twin studies to understand this basic fact, a fact that's been apparent to everyone throughout history, except for the past ~40 years in the west.

View on HN

My father was told all his life that he had the same character than his mother, and until I was 10, I was told I showed the same character as my grandfather (I still have his walking cadence and posture).

My father is adopted.

The belief system opposing "very strong heritability of intelligence" isn't "blank-slatism". Plenty of researchers who believe there are only weak connections between genes and intelligence also reject the strong-form blank slate hypothesis, to the point where, when I see people bring "blank slate" into a conversation, I immediately have to convince myself that they're not just trying to stop the conversation.

The comment you wrote really isn't a response to anything this article said.

> The question never was about whether or not genetic differences contribute to the spread of intellectual talent—they obviously do. The question always was about the “interesting place” Paul Graham talked about, the meaningful space between genetic potential and actual achievement, and whether or not it really existed. And, at 30% or 50%, this place surely exists.

The author of this piece totally ignored that heritability is only part of the genetic lottery.

What do you mean?

That heritability doesn't cover all genetic factors. E.g. out of 100% of IQ variation 50% might be inherited, but that doesn't say that the rest is nurture, right? It can still have a huge factor of genetic lottery. E.g. isn't heritability the mean of the genetic effects, but there's also the rest of the distribution (std. dev)?

Still have no idea what distinction you are making.

"Heritability", strictly construed (as is the case in every study establishing heritability numbers) isn't necessarily a description of a "genetic lottery" at all. Plenty of things are highly heritable and not at all genetically determined, and the converse is also true!

> I trust my own observations and my conclusion

Why would you decide to hold a position strongly based on a minuscule and extremely biased sample set and reject even considering data and studies outside of your immediate experience?

Unless you’re afraid your conclusion might be challenged? Wouldn’t it be interesting either way? Either to find out that your children are typical or to find out that you and they are special in some way?

I understand many people are not interested in or curious about science, but don’t understand people who are both disinterested but also strongly hold particular positions on scientific questions.

What studies ? What data ? David Bessis basically says that there are so few twins reared apart that scientists can't make definitive conclusions.

I don't understand why you are challenging me here?

Isn't your question exactly that addressed by the (admittedly too long) article? That the graph Paul Graham presented proving the dominance of inheritance wasn't based on any science or data?

Your comment mentioned "studies" plural.

There are many studies of twins that try to determine if genes influence intelligence.

Some look at twins who are raised together. One [1] concludes that "MZ (identical) twins differ on average by 6 IQ points, while DZ (fraternal) twins differ on average by 10 IQ points".

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6202166/

> Your comment mentioned "studies" plural.

Yes? I mentioned them because the article was about a bunch of studies? I was asking the poster why you would not be interested in the validity of such studies and just decide that "common sense" was enough to make a decision?

The question was asked with genuine curiosity as this forum is mostly filled with people who appreciate science and empiricism. And I was hoping there could be a reasonable discussion.

But I'm out. An interesting discussion should be possible here purely based on data and statistics but clearly - from the downvotes - that I've stepped into some toxic American identity politic minefield.

I learned quite a time ago that it's risky to raise certain scientific subjects with USAians including my US relatives: biological evolution, the science of climate change, renewable energy or justifications for gun control - without the conversation getting emotional and heated. But I still find it weird.

It's also just common sense. Everyone agrees that traits like height is heritable, but somehow whatever goes on inside the brain is not? The null hypothesis here is that it is heritable, and I see no proof whatsoever against that hypothesis. My personal experience raising my own kids and observing countless others confirms common sense. Your own child is not one data point, it's a million small data points, things you notice in what they're like as a baby, and how they develop over time. Only someone without kids would boil this down to a "single data point". I also deny that I have do anything to prove heritability, how about you prove the opposite? It's a conclusion that is so obvious to the impartial mind that to be confused about it is a sign of extreme ideological indoctrination. To deny heritability of personality and intelligence is to deny evolution itself.

> It's also just common sense.

Centuries of success with empirical based science is a direct rejection of the approach of trusting "just common sense".

> Only someone without kids would boil this down to a "single data point".

Why are you personalizing this? I have a family and have observed children grow from emergence from the womb and I grew in a much larger family. I'm not sure what the relevance is to the points being discussed. This seems like argument by anecdotal fallacy.

> I also deny that I have do anything to prove heritability, how about you prove the opposite?

I didn't ask you to prove anything. I asked you why you have no interest in looking at a scientific question beyond "I trust my own observations and my conclusion"?

And this question seemingly misses the point - it not a binary question about whether traits are inherited or not but about the degree of the role of inheritance. The author of the piece emphasizes this point extensively.

The salient point of the too-long article was about flaws in a seminal paper on this subject where the author Bouchard presented carefully collected data for identical twins - showing remarkably low variance suggesting a high degree of inheritance. But he hid the data he had collected for non-identical twins, which would have provided us with a basis for judging the significance of the findings regarding identical twins.

> It's a conclusion that is so obvious to the impartial mind that to be confused about it is a sign of extreme ideological indoctrination.

Can we just discuss the science and statistics here?

No-one is denying heritability here. The only question is where the heritability figure lies, and how reliable are the estimates that have been put forward in the past. I don't see how anyone's "personal experience" could be a valid methodology for deciding whether the heritability of IQ is 30% or 80%. As for the "extreme ideological indoctrination" slander, it'd be great if you could just withdraw it.

I agree. A child is a million small datapoints. My son established a strong personality early on that defied our attempts to modify it. Meanwhile he was raised in a relaxed environment that certainly provided no environmental explanation for his fixations.

I was raised with five siblings, yet only I got into fights at school, and made my mother cry on a regular basis. Each of my sibs is similar and each of us is strikingly different, too.

It’s just Bayesian thinking. Too much open mindedness to scientific papers can have you frequently changing your beliefs based on some recent scientific paper that came out, or even worse based on a recent college graduate journalist’s summary of a recent scientific paper from some random university..

As opposed to holding on to a belief that has been reinforced via personal experience countless times until very strong evidence proves otherwise. You end up with a set of beliefs that have a much higher chance of being true this way.

> You end up with a set of beliefs that have a much higher chance of being true this way.

Or, confirmation bias gives a much higher chance of you believing so.

People fight and die over beliefs reinforced via personal experience. It's not proof against incorrectness.

There is rarely proof this or that way. It’s usually evidence, sometimes strong, sometimes weak, and you use your experience and intelligence to decide what is true. Though honestly, if you end up with a process where you change your mind whenever a new scientific paper comes out opposite of what you used to believe, well, I guess you would either have not thought about it much or your thinking is deeply flawed.

The article only asks the question of scientists have data to conclude that IQ is inherited. The author is only saying that there are so many problems with the little data we have, that he cannot rule out correlation without causation.

People in general don't like being told they're wrong. This means that arguments that challenge status quo get suppressed. Science isn't magically immune to this just because you add a label "it's scientifically proven, bro!". Therefore, a lot of research on controversial topics can be safely discarded simply because people doing the research have lots of reasons to be biased. This is especially relevant in social sciences, because it's a bottomless pit of controversial topics, and has almost zero possibilities of repeating an experiment. Sure, we have 50 years of research proving that children are blank states, but it's important to remember that eugenics were deeply rooted in science too. It's just that different societal attitudes expected scientists to come up with different scientific results, so they did. Think of a society-wide version of corporate-sponsored research centers that are expected to massage the results until they match the desired outcome.

Another thing is that sometimes it might be beneficial to believe something that isn't true. If you knew for a fact that tomorrow 99% of population will suffer extremely painful death then from the point of view of an individual the correct move would be to commit painless suicide, but the survival of humanity relies on everyone believing they'll be all fine. This is obviously a caricatural example, but there are lots of such lies that keep the society going, and "we're all equal" is just one of them.

Personally, I find it extremely difficult to believe that we'd be born equal, because evolution works only if some individuals are better than others, and I strongly believe that evolution is a thing.

> Sure, we have 50 years of research proving that children are blank states

No, we don't.

> I find it extremely difficult to believe that we'd be born equal

This is not what the article author claims or ever claimed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com