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Here's a crazy thought that's illegal to think nowadays. If you want to avoid crazy, illegal thoughts, please stop reading. Maybe - just maybe - we're not all

Here's a crazy thought that's illegal to think nowadays. If you want to avoid crazy, illegal thoughts, please stop reading. Maybe - just maybe - we're not all equal cyphers at birth like we learned in school. Maybe genes are part of the reason a successful person's daughter is successful. Maybe important character traits are heritable. Maybe the 20+ years we spend being raised is less consequential to our character and intelligence than who mom and dad chose as partners. For example: IQ is highly heritable, and IQ is positively correlated with income, employment status, military rank, having a "socially desirable" job, etc. [1] Perhaps other traits are similarly heritable and correlated with the attainment of traditional markers of success. Studies like this one on inequality are common - and useless. They ignore the genetic confound, the possibility of genetic influence on the object of study. In this case, why not look at identical twins of rich and poor parents who were raised apart in different environments? My own suspicion is that our social rules play some role in inequality, but genes play a much larger role than is commonly accepted. [1] http://www.gwern.net/iq http://www.gwern.net/iq

zeroer 10y ago
This sounds like a testable hypothesis -- that the effects of genetics should be separable from the effects of upbringing via twin and adoption studies. In fact, I'd wager it's already been done.
- mercer 10y ago
  From what I understand many twin studies have been done, and generally they indicate a much stronger genetic effect than is generally thought. But because these kinds of findings are so sensitive and have a long history of being abused, there's a tendency to downplay them or at least avoid discussing them. Maybe even a (slight?) tendency to avoid further research. But please correct me if I'm wrong. Most of my thoughts on the matter come from one of Steven Pinker's books and I've never done a thorough review on the subject.
RodericDay 10y ago
I find it honestly disturbing how, throughout the ages, there's always people desperately trying to justify to themselves their exalted station in society. It's super easy to find examples of old white men talking about how women couldn't handle voting because the blood drain through their ovaries, or racists talking about how the cranial differences explain the difference in intelligence. And yet in 2016, in the face of massive blatant inequality in living standards between races, and provable systemic obstacles, you still have tons of nerdy LessWrong types talking about how it's time to own up to genetics.
- thucydides 10y ago
  It's a very emotional subject. Maybe I'm unusual in that respect - genetic differences are not an emotional subject for me. My 3 siblings and I were adopted at birth, all from different parents. From birth, we had the same environment, but the differences between us in terms of intelligence, interests, education, career tracks, The Big 5 - are extremely dramatic. I'd prefer not to discuss my family too much here, so I'll leave an exercise for the reader instead: imagine the largest possible diversity in all of those categories. You would not be far off. The differences I've seen between my siblings are much, much greater than those I've usually seen between biological siblings. And the studies I've seen have yielded similar conclusions. My claim in my original post - that DNA and society both play some role in inequality - seems obvious and benign to me. Honest question: why do you want this to be false? Do you think we have social policies that promote kindness, tolerance, and charity only because we believe everyone is identical? Wouldn't it be insane to, for example, study the effect of something (anything) on mortality - without asking study participants if they smoke tobacco? How is adjusting for the tobacco confound moral, but adjusting for genetic confounds immoral? Wouldn't it be better to follow the truth wherever it leads?
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    Of course genetics is a factor (and I think you're overplaying the rejection of that), but to what extent does it explain inequality? Now I haven't personally looked into it in detail, but I'm guessing that, since it's obvious as you say, some studies on inequality have indeed considered genetics. And I think that if the answer was "Yeah, poor people were all just born too dumb to be rich" it would probably have been a pretty big story, and brought up often in these debates. Since it hasn't, I'm guessing the answer is that it's more complicated than that. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

zeroer 10y ago

This sounds like a testable hypothesis -- that the effects of genetics should be separable from the effects of upbringing via twin and adoption studies. In fact, I'd wager it's already been done.

mercer 10y ago
From what I understand many twin studies have been done, and generally they indicate a much stronger genetic effect than is generally thought. But because these kinds of findings are so sensitive and have a long history of being abused, there's a tendency to downplay them or at least avoid discussing them. Maybe even a (slight?) tendency to avoid further research. But please correct me if I'm wrong. Most of my thoughts on the matter come from one of Steven Pinker's books and I've never done a thorough review on the subject.

RodericDay 10y ago

I find it honestly disturbing how, throughout the ages, there's always people desperately trying to justify to themselves their exalted station in society. It's super easy to find examples of old white men talking about how women couldn't handle voting because the blood drain through their ovaries, or racists talking about how the cranial differences explain the difference in intelligence. And yet in 2016, in the face of massive blatant inequality in living standards between races, and provable systemic obstacles, you still have tons of nerdy LessWrong types talking about how it's time to own up to genetics.

thucydides 10y ago
It's a very emotional subject. Maybe I'm unusual in that respect - genetic differences are not an emotional subject for me. My 3 siblings and I were adopted at birth, all from different parents. From birth, we had the same environment, but the differences between us in terms of intelligence, interests, education, career tracks, The Big 5 - are extremely dramatic. I'd prefer not to discuss my family too much here, so I'll leave an exercise for the reader instead: imagine the largest possible diversity in all of those categories. You would not be far off. The differences I've seen between my siblings are much, much greater than those I've usually seen between biological siblings. And the studies I've seen have yielded similar conclusions. My claim in my original post - that DNA and society both play some role in inequality - seems obvious and benign to me. Honest question: why do you want this to be false? Do you think we have social policies that promote kindness, tolerance, and charity only because we believe everyone is identical? Wouldn't it be insane to, for example, study the effect of something (anything) on mortality - without asking study participants if they smoke tobacco? How is adjusting for the tobacco confound moral, but adjusting for genetic confounds immoral? Wouldn't it be better to follow the truth wherever it leads?
- aninhumer 10y ago
  Of course genetics is a factor (and I think you're overplaying the rejection of that), but to what extent does it explain inequality? Now I haven't personally looked into it in detail, but I'm guessing that, since it's obvious as you say, some studies on inequality have indeed considered genetics. And I think that if the answer was "Yeah, poor people were all just born too dumb to be rich" it would probably have been a pretty big story, and brought up often in these debates. Since it hasn't, I'm guessing the answer is that it's more complicated than that. Do you have evidence to the contrary?