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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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As far as I know, twin and adoption studies consistently show that genetics matter much more than parenting in causing differences between people. So the HBD-aligned people are right about that part.

Of course "does genetics or parenting matter more for causing differences between people" is not the only nature-nurture question of interest, and behavior genetic methods might not be viable for other questions, or might require adjustments to the biometric numbers to be applicable.

I'd offer a third take: it's likely that the high degree of overlap between parentage and culture is due to the mutual influence each has upon the other, over time, to the point that there are very good reasons it's difficult to tease the two apart.

Genetics shapes culture. If a group has a higher than normal tendency to reclusiveness, or aggression, or neuroticism, or quantitative ability, etc., then if the resulting society is to be successful, it must shape its institutions to both offset the negative impacts of that tendency as well as guide the positive aspects in a productive direction. Successful institutions must deal with people as they exist, not as anyone wishes them to be.

Culture shapes genetics. Culture is what determines status, and status heavily influences who has an easier time contributing his genes to the next generation.

Overall, I'd say the blank-slatists are trivially wrong, and the HBDers are directionally correct, but that it's unfortunately easy to overstate one's case.

My father retired from thirty years at a job which I intuitively understood before I was ever hired there under him. My mother and I both do desktop publishing. Our family’s favorite game is Perquackey, the Scrabble-style dice game, and we each have a copy. None of us have Scrabble.

Brain genes are remarkable.

Certainly. I can take a look at my immediate family, and link up all sorts of similarities in terms of likes/dislikes, talents, emotional reactivity, communication style, etc. It's just that this sort of observation can't really separate nature vs. nurture when you're linked by both genes and experience.

Though once you've gone through the massive stack of adoption studies, twin studies, everything-we're-allowed-to-do-ethically studies, etc., you find that both matter a lot.

There's a pattern in the interaction that I suspect is very common. Take height as an example. Your maximum potential height is genetically determined, full stop. But your actual height as a fraction of that potential is environmentally determined--did you get adequate nutrition as a child? Did your legs get amputated in a car accident?

That said, this is more examining individual cases and family clusters, rather than the trends of population genetics.

Is cultural intervention honestly any more palatable than genetic pessimism to the opponents of hbd? Stop doing damage to society and you can examine the issue at your leisure. But if you're going to impose large costs on me and mine you need to have real receipts.

But also, that groups vary in average just trivially follows from the idea that different individuals can vary on the same measures. Any randomly selected group will vary to some degree just due to internal variance and it takes very little selective pressure to make that variance larger. It would require some kind of miracle for groups that were isolated for thousands of years to not vary somewhat and then we're just haggling on price.

But if you're going to impose large costs on me and mine you need to have real receipts.

Actually you just need to have a sufficient majority of the voters or people in positions at power in the institutions that make decisions about what costs to bear in order to create equality. Most political decisions do not seem to be very informed by science.

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