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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'

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?

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?