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Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

• syops 5y ago
  From the article: Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes. The fact that this area is controversial suggests to me that it is worth exploration. I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. To me it is obvious this is so since the mentally disabled can’t. There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics. This belief of mine is considered heretical amongst leftist colleagues (I’m a liberal myself on almost every issue). As a college we act as if everyone can pass. Years of administration telling the math department that our passing rate is too low have led me to pretty much pass everyone who takes the final exam. Last semester 80% passed but only around 50% deserved to.
  • brailsafe 5y ago
    Likewise, it's my my less experienced impression that some people just can't get (or at least it's overwhelmingly more difficult) basic programming concepts with even a visual building block system
    • ogma 5y ago
      And why would we ever draw conclusions about genetics, even if what the two of you are saying is true?
  • linksnapzz 5y ago
    Some years ago, California tried to make it so that you had to pass Algebra II to graduate high school. I think the state backed down from that, because it meant only 25% of students could pass. Or maybe they just bowdlerized the definition of algebra II. It’s too bad, because I don’t think anyone should be able to leave high school without understanding compound interest-sorta vital for participating in a modern economy. Also, it’s not like we can stop loaning money to the innumerate, even if that might be the ethical thing to do.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      Do you really need to know Algebra II to understand exponential growth? Couldn't you just get by with multiplication and seeing a pattern and learning the FV function in excel?
      • thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > Do you really need to know Algebra II to understand exponential growth? Couldn't you just get by with multiplication and seeing a pattern If you could do that, you could probably pass Algebra II.
      • michael1999 5y ago
        The last 18 months of embarrassing COVID interventions show just how un-intuitive exponential growth is.
    • basementcat 5y ago
      I wonder how much of the difficulty is due to large class size. If the student to teacher ratio were smaller, would teachers be better able to tailor instruction to struggling students?
      • robbedpeter 5y ago
        Most teachers would struggle with algebra II.
        • jessaustin 5y ago
          My high school had one teacher capable of teaching calculus. His seniority allowed him to fob it off on someone who could not. She left the profession entirely a few years after I graduated. Of course, one may learn calculus from a book, which was what many of us did in that class.
        • dorchadas 5y ago
          This is a big problem imo. In my experience teaching high school, a lot of elementary school teachers struggle with basic math... And that's where the problems arise that we have to try to fix later on.
  • shashwatak 5y ago
    perhaps some people cannot learn algebra / calculus the way it is traditionally taught in the classroom. perhaps the students who are failing just need a different environment, more time, more patience, different resources?
    • Falandafa2021 5y ago
      Or more likely that people are different and not everything is environment.
      • seba_dos1 5y ago
        Or even more likely the environment fails to accommodate for people being different.
        • sjwalter 5y ago
          Yes, different environments exclude and include some people, those who may be on the border of capability seem likeliest to be impacted here. That still doesn't mean that ALL people can learn calculus, given enough attempts to find the right environment for each of them. Shows, also, the silliness of this argument. Some people can pick up calc at age 10 no sweat whatsoever. Others struggle mightily with the basics in their 30s. Should we as a society invest 1000x the resources in the strugglers to ensure they can achieve the same understanding?
          • mrob 5y ago
            >Should we as a society invest 1000x the resources in the strugglers to ensure they can achieve the same understanding? There's no need for everybody to reach the same level of understanding, but I think the pandemic has shown the importance of teaching as many as possible the basic concepts of calculus. "Flatten the curve" doesn't mean much when you've never heard of integration. The same applies to climate change. People will have more faith in mathematical models if they think it's something they could have done themselves if they really wanted to (overly optimistic judgement or not) instead of some bullshit the so-called experts made up to bamboozle them.
  • ctrlp 5y ago
    If you want everyone to pass, lower the standards. The end result will be that certificates from schools without high standards will be worth less in the eyes of employers (while still costing the same to the student). As they progress through such a system, some students will be placed in advance of their abilities and fail out at a higher rate than they might otherwise when they reach an institution with non-negotiable standards, like the hard sciences, demoralizing those who might otherwise have found their place of achievement, self-respect, and independence. Or, even those institutions will cave to such pressures and simply "mark 'em up, ship 'em on", as you have described. Caveat emptor.
    • beej71 5y ago
      Why not improve at teaching the material instead of lowering the standards?
      • ctrlp 5y ago
        Why, indeed. Maybe our standards for teachers are too lenient. In any case, it is possible that there is no quality of teaching that will change a student's natural aptitude. It's a disservice to huge swaths of the population to funnel them, ill-prepared, into colleges. Maybe a network of high-quality trade schools would be a better fit for some.
      • jayd16 5y ago
        The obvious answer is you lower the standards that year because somewhere the system broke down. (It being much more likely that there is an issue with the system than some kind of statistical anomaly with the students) Then you evaluate and attempt to improve techniques as is done every year.
      • concordDance 5y ago
        How? Hundreds of billions of dollars and a million man years have been spent on that problem to get to the current state.
      • rocqua 5y ago
        Two factors. First, there are clearly a large number of people out there who have no business trying to pass algebra 101. Even if they theoretically could with sufficient effort and tutoring, it is not worth their time, nor is it going to lead to that much that is beneficial. Second, teaching is already hard. Teaching math also requires an understanding of math that is rare. Hence finding people who are good math teachers is hard. Finding people who are good math teachers and willing to do it for a math teachers salary is even harder. If it were trivial to improve our teachers we would off course do it. But it is not at all trivial. I think this matters less in a liberal arts college, but especially if you are going to ask students to build on their algebra 101 with other courses. If passing algebra 101 took a lot of effort, chances are that the other courses are going to take the same amount of effort, if not more.
  • lifeisstillgood 5y ago
    I like to feel the same way as your colleagues about "everyone can learn to code". I can definitely say that there are many people for whom it is a struggle - even those on college courses. But a hundred years ago we could easily have the same conversation about simply reading and writing - they (the poor, women, or "lower class" ) luke not be taught to read. But it turns out that if you start young enough, and put enough effort in, 99% of everyone can learn So, perhaps society is not putting enough effort in, or asking enough effort from, our kids for them all to learn calculus. As the Agile Manifesto says, the work delivered represents the effort input so far. If society wants all children to learn calculus, we need to pay that price. Edit: I think that we do need a new conversation about education. We have My father left full time education at 14, at 18 most of my peers left school and only 25% of us went to college. Today it's 50% it the total spend has not gone up in line. I honestly don't know what kind of world the "universal education" advocates of the 1870s were imagining - but I am damn sure it was not people doing college courses on their iPhones, but it is the world they ushered in. We need to double down on what worked for the 20th Century (and avoid the, y'know wars and genocide and stuff). Education will lay at the heart of that.
    • Ekaros 5y ago
      I think we can still have discussion about functional illiteracy. That is group who can technically read, but not at level needed for every day life. Very likely there is certain part of normal distribution who can't reach that level. But how large we can expect it to be is good question to consider.
    • tsywke44 5y ago
      Kids are savant at learning ”muscle memory skills”. But there is a reason 2nd graders dont do book reviews of classic literature. Even though they can absolutely read the complex words out loud on autopilot any day of the week.
      • lifeisstillgood 5y ago
        Yeah. it isn't that just saying there is a difference between a 10 year old and a 19 year old Edit: Actually, I think your premise is wrong. Children don't read words they don't understand "like muscle memory". The differences in meaning between, idk, betrothed, engaged, wedded and living in sin are superficial but they carry with them implications of social value, history and more. Children are supposed to read books and pick up context and understand meaning as they go along. We don't expect a 10 year old to grok calculus any more than we expect them to grok social/sexual arrangements. But we have different standards for 19 year olds - in the case of sexual arrangements it's obvious why. Perhaps less so for calculus. Reading and comprehension levels are hard to guage for this reason - at a certain point the words are placeholders for political positions. And it's hard to tell if someone does not understand the word or disagrees with the politics. Please see every election for past ten years for reference
  • spaniard89277 5y ago
    > Years of administration telling the math department that our passing rate is too low have led me to pretty much pass everyone who takes the final exam. Last semester 80% passed but only around 50% deserved to Doesn't this contribute to lower the reputation of the universities? I mean, I did sociology in a small university in northern Spain and there was debate between the stats and methodology professors and pretty much everyone else about this. In the end I'm grateful to my stats and methodology professors, because having to work very hard is the only thing that actually gave me something useful to go and fight with the world. Many of my peers had to go to other unis because they couldn't pass there, so in the end they get a pass like me, the same in the eyes of employers, but they know it's bullshiting, and I know too. IDK, It seems to me that there's a lot of lazyness in social sciences, and this kind of hard attitude to it is not only good for the students, but needed in the field. IDK in the US, but this professors got a lot of heat for their stances on what a university is about, but they stood their ground, even when they've got hit by political bullshit, denied money for research, etc. There's another thing (again, IDK if it's the same in the US), but why don't you see it in CS or Engineering faculties? I mean, I remember in my uni the students of this faculties had maybe a couple of professors that where ok to lower the bar a bit, but most of them just assumed that you gotta learn what you gotta learn. And many of them where pretty hostile to students, 180º stance from what I see in Stanford Moocs for example.
    • stathibus 5y ago
      Maybe this is a stupid question, but is there any indication that most US universities cared about their academic reputation in the first place? I don't see any.
      • spaniard89277 5y ago
        Well in Spain everybody says to care, yet I see what I see. Not to mention that everyone complains about the low rankings of spanish unis, but I'd say that's mostly a consquence of money and some biases at play.
    • syops 5y ago
      Yes, this has long term negative effects but I need a job and don’t need the stress of being hounded by administration. In the old days the state funded a much higher percent of a student’s higher education. In those days, society was the client. Today the student is the client and the student does not want to fail.
  • fallingknife 5y ago
    There are some questions science is not allowed to ask now. This is, of course, because they fear the possible findings. And I laugh every time some progressive I know shits on the Republicans for being "anti-science." (not that they are any better)
    • ogma 5y ago
      You sound like an idiot.
  • DrLindemann 5y ago
    I think in the paedagogy community genetics is often an excuse for the unwillingness to develop right teaching concepts. It's then the "fault" of the pupils. Polya did good works, especial regarding Mathematics. Of course there are genetic influences and not everybody can be an Einstein or rocket scientist. But below that level there is a lot possible that has nothing to do with genetics. Most things are more influenced by motivation than the ability. And on that the real cause does not matter. If the people would spend only a fraction of the energy, they waste with questioning if something is genetic or not, in the development of skills by learning - they would improve beyond the proclaimed "genetic" level. Reduce media consume. Reduce politics. Almost the whole discussion is toxic. The right proclaims everything is genetic but on the other side punish people not having the "good genetics".
    • temp8964 5y ago
      "The right proclaims everything is genetic". I don't know what kind of "right" are you talking about. I don't believe it is mainstream conservative thought to claim family/school training/displine/education does not matter but only genetics matters.
  • thatfrenchguy 5y ago
    This doesn’t necessarily have to do with genetics but with the environment you live in when going to school. My parents and grand parents were both born in the countryside and couldn’t get algebra or calculus (whereas myself and my siblings didn’t have issues learning) because they were lacking the basis that you now more easily get in primary and secondary school if you have supportive parents and teachers. By the time you’re in college, it’s already over. It’s why good daycare / preschool / school for everyone matters, otherwise you’re just missing out on a lot of potential talent.
  • croes 5y ago
    Is a mental disability not caused by genetic disorder, injury or illness. This would invalidate your claim. You wouldn't use a contergan victim as a example for the thesis that not all can learn shot put. Isn't the whole point that you can't simply look at the gene of a person and know what his mind is capable of except for genetic defects and even then it's hard to estimate.
  • TameAntelope 5y ago
    I hope you don't think this article in any way supports your belief that some people can't learn algebra/calculus due to any kind of genetic traits, because I don't think the complexity of either rises to the level of "difficulty" that only gifted minds can comprehend. Very, very little in this world does. Your belief should probably be considered heretical, even among your conservative colleagues, because your colleagues should recognize how deficiencies in one area can be made up for in other areas, sometimes (but not always) at a higher efficiency cost. Where genetic gifts are lacking, determination and perseverance can almost always make up the difference, especially at a basic algebra/calculus level.
    • DangitBobby 5y ago
      While I'm sure almost everyone can learn the basics of algebra or calculus, no amount of wishful thinking will give everyone the brain needed to master them or even be proficient. I'm not sure where your belief that perseverance can overcome all even comes from. I have been trying to get better at chess lately. I grew up playing it so I'm already fairly proficient, and I've been putting a decent amount of free time into studying openings and playing puzzles. Yesterday, I played my friend who hasn't played in literally years and never really played seriously anyway, and he beat me handily 3/3 games. I know that I do not have the brain to be a chess master, no matter how much time I put in, because I don't have enough working memory to keep the board in my head.
      • TameAntelope 5y ago
        I disagree, as it's not a sufficiently difficult topic to warrant some kind of genetic stratification. Life circumstance stratification, certainly, and you will get no disagreement from me that some people don't have the time or energy necessary to devote to something as not-immediately-useful as calculus, but from an intellect perspective, no. Everyone who is not experiencing some kind of mental illness has the intellectual capacity to learn calculus, though I will capitulate it is fortunate for me and this statement that we do classify a low enough IQ as a mental illness!
        • 5y ago
  • myWindoonn 5y ago
    Hello, fellow mathematician. The first step in your proof which doesn't convince me is the claim that, in general, "levels of intelligence" exist, admit a partial order, and can reliably predict whether certain people can learn certain topics. In general, you'll find that "leftists" believe that psychometrics is bogus in terms of science. Instead, it masquerades as science in order to fool the public into believing that biased public policy is neutral. There's no denial that some folks have brain damage, developmental disabilities, etc. but a denial that standardized tests are an appropriate proxy for genuine medical diagnoses. Community colleges should present themselves as a public benefit. We shouldn't ask that everybody pass any class, simply that everybody has the opportunity to attend/audit any class. It is unfortunately true that the typical university administration is clueless and money-grubbing, preferring graduation rates to other metrics.
    • syops 5y ago
      I don’t claim that there is a partial order to intelligence. Indeed, I think it’s clear that no such can exist. Let me put it this way. The set of people who can’t learn algebra (using any reasonable standard for this) is nonempty as it includes the set of mentally retarded people. I further suspect that this set is considerably larger than the set of mentally retarded people. I further suspect but didn’t state this that if one doesn’t have exposure to algebra growing up then it is extremely difficult to learn as an adult. Children are easier to brain wash and in low level Mathematics we do a great deal of brain washing.
    • concordDance 5y ago
      "Leftists" don't think the correlations between results in IQ tests and many other things (such as memory, income and reflexes) exist?
      • myWindoonn 5y ago
        Correlation doesn't always imply causation, right? For example, there's a correlation between IQ and income. There are several causative possibilities: * IQ causes income * Income causes IQ * Some unknown thing causes both income and IQ * The correlation is spurious; IQ and income are unrelated Evidence strongly suggests that the third bullet point is true; socioeconomic class causes both income and IQ. Richer people living in nicer neighborhoods both have better opportunities for income, and also better opportunities for education; education causes IQ. This is why redlining is brought up so often as a root cause of so many of the disparities in quality of life; redlining deepened socioeconomic divides.
  • threatofrain 5y ago
    IMO, biological differences and barriers certainly exist and are non-trivial, but the differences between private and public schools demonstrates the degree to which institutional finesse can accommodate student strengths and shortcomings, including differences in intelligence or disability. In other words, we have a long way to go. In some schools around the Bay Area, we have half the students on the fastest track, and about half the math faculty as calculus teachers. An immodest minority of students complete Calculus BC early and go on to the local college to continue their math education for their remaining years in HS. And these aren't even the top 50 schools in the nation.
    • rejectedandsad 5y ago
      I do wonder what’s gained by this. There are plenty of physics professors (perhaps even most) that didn’t do calculus until college or at least senior year of high school, what’s the advantage?
      • threatofrain 5y ago
        I'm not sure it's easy to discuss the high school transcripts of people with university posts. How did you get in touch with this information? The gains become clear depending on the degree to which you know what you want, and especially if you're thinking about graduate programs. 1. Calculus in some sense is somewhat disorganized, and it sucks that it's a gateway to more math in the US. By finishing Calculus early you can move on to the math you wanted to learn, such as Linear Algebra. 2. University students may have to spend about a year learning Calculus. That's a long time, and to some people they'd rather spend their money better by learning something else or graduating early. 3. If you're thinking about graduate studies in something technical such as Econ or Stats, then you'll probably want at least Analysis. The problem is that in the grand scheme of things, even Analysis does not leave you very prepared to do things, it just makes you prepared to learn more, so you may want to get ahead of this problem.
        • rejectedandsad 5y ago
          > I'm not sure it's easy to discuss the high school transcripts of people with university posts. How did you get in touch with this information? Because 95% of the time high school work doesn't transfer to the college level even if you do semesters at De Anza. You're back to scratch unless you go to flagship in-state, and even then you can only transfer up to a certain amount (at my undergrad it was up to Calc 2 - several people I know took Calc 3 in the same institution in high school but had to take it again).
  • orwin 5y ago
    I do have an anecdotal conter-example to your theory. In my country, highschool last three years. The first year, i was living in the dorms with some of my classmates. One, let's call him M, was fairly dissipated and, while everyone would rather play and discuss than study, and had shitty grades in everything but biology. Math was his weakest, with grade ranging from E- to D+ (i try to convert grades here, my grades wer in the A range and the average was B-), and English/spanish were not a lot better. At the time, at the end of the first year, we had to choose specialities and which kind of diploma we could do. the "general" kind, with to specialities, economics/humanities or science, or the "technological" one, with three (electric, mechanic, civil). He realized at the end of the year that the only thing he wanted to do was biology, but as this subject was only available in the science speciality, he was fucked. Impossible to get to the "general"branch with his grade. He struck a deal with the school administration: 4 hour a week added to his curriculum, one hour every night after eating and before going in our dorms to make sure he worked. The year, in math, did not start well. He had a F/F- as his first grade (the average was D+, top of the class was B), but our professor was exceptionnal. we had 3 math illiterate in our class, and while the notation was pretty harsh on them, he took time to help everyone understand with interesting examples, stories and exercises. He even took hours of his own time for supplementary lessons. Our class relation was special too, we were only 20, and spent a lot of time together, even after college. Last time i talked to M he was doing a Master in marine biology, and aimed for a doctorate End of the 3rd year, we have to get the national test. Our class ended up with an average grade of A-, M had a B+ and wasn't the lowest scorer in math (of our class). Miles ahead of the nationnal average (C+/B- that year). It was a public technological highscool in a rural area. The other close HS was one dedicated to farming. Culturally, we did not start at an advantage compared to the average kid of our country, i'd say we were at a disadvantage. But great teachers and small, but close class can help you emancipate from some of your determinations.
  • beej71 5y ago
    Here's some food for thought on "further study": * What percentage of your students hate math? * How do you differentiate between someone who doesn't get it because it's beyond their mental skill level versus someone who doesn't get it because they'd rather be doing literally anything else? * When you say "mentally disabled", what exactly does that mean in the context of a spectrum of ability levels across the species? * There are a lot of reasons people might fail your class. What are they? What's the percentage breakdown? * What are the dangers of thinking that not all people can learn math? What are the dangers of not thinking that?
    • syops 5y ago
      Oh, I’ve thought a great about these things. None of your questions are new to me or are ones I’ve not considered. I did not come to my conclusion quickly. Here are some more thoughts to ponder: Children are easier to brain wash than adults and teaching basic math involves a great deal of brain washing. To what extent is it the case that a person with no exposure to algebraic concepts growing up is at a disadvantage to learning algebra as an adult? There is a theory that if one doesn’t learn a language in childhood then it is impossible for them to learn one as an adult. Is something similar applicable to Mathematics?
      • beej71 5y ago
        Would you mind sharing your conclusions? Though I don't know of any studies about algebra in particular, kids show greater neuroplasticity in general than adults. So learning anything as an adult tends to be more difficult. But I live with an American who reasonably fluent in Norwegian after 2 years of study in their 30s. It's certainly not impossible. I have no doubt that math, like virtually everything, is more difficult for adults to pick up from scratch.
        • syops 5y ago
          What is theorized to be impossible is learning a language as an adult if you did not learn a language as a child. That is, if at age 20 you know 0 languages then you’ll never be able really learn a language. For obvious reasons experiments in this regard are few. My conclusion is that some people simply can’t learn algebra. Be it genetic, environmental, lack of intellectual fortitude, lack of “intelligence”, or any combination thereof it is simply the case that some people can’t learn algebra.
  • DanHulton 5y ago
    You're making a lot of leaps of logic here, which might be why your colleagues are disagreeing with you. You go from "not everyone can learn algebra or calculus" and "mental disabilities exist" to "therefore intelligence is a scale and controlled by genetics and unalterable," which doesn't really track. Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your aptitudes, and you've just dismissed them out of hand, apparently in favour of pre-determined genetic intelligence. I mean, all I know of you is this comment, so I could easily be missing a lot more context about this argument you've had, but it sounds like you have an axe to grind, not a carefully-considered conclusion.
    • clusterfish 5y ago
      How do you know what effect upbringing and cultural values has on math performance? You know because there's research for that. But you can't base any argument on that when research into alternative (or complementary), genetics-based explanations is being stiffled. Or well you can, but that's just society-scale version of googling for statements that you agree with instead of questions that they're supposed to answer. When you stiffle research directions for political reasons, you're doing politics, not science, and the arguments based on lack of stiffled research don't hold any more water than arguments based on no research.
      • strogonoff 5y ago
        > society-scale version of googling for statements that you agree with instead of questions that they're supposed to answer Unfortunately, in practice science often turns out to be almost as much of a vehicle for confirming answers one already has in mind, rather than open-ended investigation.
        • clusterfish 5y ago
          Nothing is ever perfect. That's not a reason to deliberately make it worse than it normally is.
    • tnzm 5y ago
  • bawolff 5y ago
    > I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. To me it is obvious this is so since the mentally disabled can’t. There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics. I think most people agree that there are extremes. There probably exists a small number of people who literally cannot (just like how 1 in a million could probably teach themselves calculus at age 10, also exists). However it's a big jump to conclude that even a small percentage of the people at your college cannot in the literal sense - i.e. if their life depended on it, they had all the resources they could want, they had no other distractions.
    • virgilp 5y ago
      > i.e. if their life depended on it, they had all the resources they could want, they had no other distractions. You just gave the definition of "cannot". Those circumstances will never happen, they're pure hypotheticals. Sure, hypothetically I might be able to play competitive tennis against Nadal. Practically, though, that'll never happen, I cannot and will never be able to do that - pretending otherwise is just naive and purely theoretical discussion.
      • bawolff 5y ago
        If the original claim was merely that a certain percentage of the population are not going to learn algebra - it would be uncontroversial and i would agree with it. After all, we all know that some people fail classes. If the claim was merely that math comes easier to some than others - again it would be an uncontroversial claim and i would agree with it. However, my reading of the original comment was that a good portion of the population literally are physically incapable under any circumstance, including the silly hypothetical circumstances i laid out, to learn algebra. I think that is false. It sounds like you do too. So i guess we're in agreement.
        • virgilp 5y ago
          > So i guess we're in agreement. Not exactly. I read the original claim that they are "incapable to learn algebra even in very good/way above average (but still realistic) circumstances".
  • NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
    As a scientist who thinks professionally about things like culture, behavioral genetics, and psychology, I can say: the idea that there /would not be/ humans who cannot learn calculus is the one that is hard to believe.
    • syops 5y ago
      Thanks for your comment. My statement has unleashed passions in some. It’s been interesting reading the comments.
  • kitsune_ 5y ago
    The elephant in the room is that math has a giant UX problem. The notation is inconsistent and not nearly as logical as it could be.
    • xyzzyz 5y ago
      Math notation is very consistent and it’s optimized for convenience. It’s been constantly refined over last centuries. People who complain about notation usually actually have problem with the substance, and the complaints about notation is just a coping mechanism, to deny hurtful reality that one can’t understand something hard, blaming external factors instead. Ask yourself: if notation was genuinely confusing, why would mathematicians make themselves suffer needlessly? Now, to be sure, some people and some books are better at teaching than others, but it typically has nothing to do with notation used, and everything to do with the order of introduction of concepts, level of detail of explanation (which can be both too high and too low), amount and quality of examples, etc. However, the core issue here is that some things are actually genuinely hard, and people of average intelligence simply cannot grasp them without expending ludicrous amounts of effort. If you have some concrete suggestions about mathematical notation, ways it could be improved in more than superficial manner, I (and the rest of mathematical community) is very much open to hear them. Improvements in notation do happen regularly, and when they are valuable, they reach wide acceptance. For example, in the second half of 20th century, the notation of commutative diagrams have been invented, and it spread like a wildfire, because it genuinely facilitates understanding.
      • drath 5y ago
        > if notation was genuinely confusing, why would mathematicians make themselves suffer needlessly? Because they are unable to change it. Just like with any thing evolved over a long time, like music notation, languages, even, to some extent, programming languages. Every change brings a lot of pushback, it's a monumental task to create a new one and even more so is getting any traction with it.
        • xyzzyz 5y ago
          > Because they are unable to change it. That doesn’t square well with the fact that notation keeps getting refined and improved. There is no pushback for genuine improvements. Biggest problem here is that there rarely are changes that clearly and meaningfully improve situation over status quo. I gave one example above, but overall, I am not going to take complaints about notation being obstacle to understanding seriously without concrete ways how to meaningfully improve it. You can of course keep complaining that it’s confusing, but without proposals for improvements, you’re actually complaining about the difficulty of substance, not the notation, and it says more about you than about notation.
  • kragen 5y ago
    > I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. To me it is obvious this is so since the mentally disabled can’t. There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics. You know, if you were trying to teach Chinese to 18-year-old English-speakers at community colleges with three hours a week of lecture, you might come to the conclusion that only a few rare geniuses had the ability to learn Chinese at all, and none would ever learn more than a few hundred words. But of course over 98% of people born and raised in China learn to speak Chinese fluently by the age of 5, and that's not because of genetics; it includes almost 98% of white people born and raised there too. There are several factors that I think of as key to this difference: 1. Plausibly there is a critical period for language acquisition, and if so, it very likely ends before age 18. Looking at an 18-year-old you can't tell whether their deficits in Chinese-speaking ability are due to genetics or environmental effects in the previous 18 years. There probably isn't an early-childhood critical period for calculus (I think you need formal operational reasoning for that) but maybe there are other things you need to develop early on for calculus to be easy for you when the time comes. Like, fluency in reading, for example. 2. Three hours a week, 36 weeks a year, for two years, is a total of 216 hours. Native language acquisition more typically involves over 20,000 hours of language exposure by age 5. Sometimes it's surprising how much more you can achieve when you apply literally over a hundred times more effort. Or, to look at it a different way, how little you will achieve when you're applying less than 1% of the effort necessary to get good results. 3. Schooling is a really terrible way to learn things. Extrinsic motivation displaces intrinsic motivation, massed practice displaces spaced practice because it gets better exam scores (especially if you know when midterms are coming up), the feedback necessary for improving is delayed by hours or days by the nature of homework grading, and the pacing is inevitably far too fast for some students and far too slow for others. It's well established that individual tutoring produces results two standard deviations better than ordinary classes (Bloom's two sigma problem). That's 30 IQ points. And Bloom wasn't even spacing out practice over decades the way you ought to; he was working within the semester structure of traditional schooling, extrinsic motivation and all. Is there a possible human culture where 98% of everybody routinely learns to do symbolic integration? Or does human nature render that impossible? Maybe. (Hell, when I have an integral to do in my head, I myself invariably settle for just approximating it unless it's a fucking monomial. Maybe I should spend a few semesters doing them on the blackboard in front of a class, I bet that would help.) But the meat grinder of community college doesn't give us much evidence about that one way or the other, except to know that we don't live in that culture today. It doesn't help us at all with the question of what to attribute to environmental effects and what to attribute to genetics. (One indication that such radical changes may be possible is the gradual transformation of literacy; hieroglyphics were the province of the priesthood and the quasi-priestly scribes, and even after the invention of alphabets, Charlemagne and Genghis Khan were illiterate. Can you imagine trying to teach a classroom full of 18-year-olds hieroglyphics in three hours a week, if they had no previous experience with reading and writing? Yet today literacy rates are over 95% in most countries, though countries with non-phonetic orthographies like Chinese and English lag a bit behind.)
  • raducu 5y ago
    The problem is who gets to decide. My english teacher/class master till 8th grade insisted I follow a profession that doesn't involve math -- she even recommend me to be a radio host for a children program -- she thought highly of me, but she thought math was not my thing. She was half right -- I have ADHD and even though my blood relatives are highly successful (doctors, lawyers, judges) NOBODY was good at math. Anyway, my parents thought otherwise and promised to buy me a PC if I get admitted to a math/programming class in highschool and paid for math tutoring. My math skills completely turned around in a year and I ultimately loved math, especially calculus.
    • syops 5y ago
      How’s this for irony. My high school guidance counselor told me that’d never pass college and now I’m teaching at one! I don’t get to decide who has the ability to learn algebra. All I get to do in this regard is determine who knows enough to pass.
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  • cdrini 5y ago
    It seems like you're essentially implying the mean value theorem here. Because there exist some people who cannot do algebra (folks with mental disabilities), and there exist some people who can, there likely must be some sort of transition point where someone doesn't have mental disabilities but can't do algebra. In that graph, you're implying that "mental intelligence" is the independent variable(s) and algebraic ability is the dependent variable. Another assumption is that the function is continuous. That's one I'm not sure about. I don't think there's a continuum between folks with mental disabilities and folks without. I think there's a discontinuity -- or perhaps overlapping spectrums on different dimensions -- but not a continuum. That's why many mental disabilities are the result of very concrete genetic variations. You can't have 80% of a generic variation. You either have it or you don't, which implies some sort of inherent discontinuity. My guess would be algebraic ability is a normal distribution. But that's not a death sentence. People who might, because of genetics or more likely nurture/circumstance be unlikely to learn a lot in algebra, are not doomed to that fate. It just means it might require a lot more time and hard work for them and their teachers -- to the point where they might not find it feasible, and instead choose to do something else.
    • syops 5y ago
      I believe the universe is discrete and that everything in it is discrete. I believe that “intellignece” is not really measurable. A person might have an intelligence as it pertains to art or critiquing art and be utterly clueless in another area. Indeed, I believe all people have a lack of ability in some area. For all of us there are things we just aren’t ever going to be able to learn and can’t learn. There are lots of reasons for this. I don’t know but can believe that genetics plays a role. There is variation on how our brains work so it seems reasonable that genetics plays some role.
  • littlestymaar 5y ago
    > I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. To me it is obvious this is so since the mentally disabled can’t. Not all people can read, it's obvious since the mentally disabled can't. Yet with proper education, all non-disabled people can be taught reading. But that doesn't mean everyone can read, if you're illiterate by your 20s, you're gonna have a hard time catching up. Same for mathematics: most people reaching even high school are too mathematically illiterate to catch up[1]. Is genetics a factor: definitely, but it's among many others. The reason why it's a partisan issue is the following: if I say genetics is a decisive factor, then I can say «it's natural, there's nothing we can do so we don't need to spend all that government money trying to help those people». The left-sided point of view goes as «There's nothing we can do about genetics, but we can change everything else. Then we need to find what are all the other factors, because those are the actionable ones». The conservative focus on genetics is mainly a justification for doing nothing. > There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics. “intelligence” is conveniently pretty ill-defined, but I don't think I'm more intelligent than my doctor friends, yet they struggled a lot to grasp even the most basic concepts of algebra when I tried to help them during our studies. “Not everyone can learn all topic” but I have yet to find evidences that your ability to learn a random topic you're not interested into is correlated with the common acceptance of the word “intelligence”. [1]: that doesn't mean it's impossible, just likely well beyond the amount of effort they can (or want to) afford.
  • bjourne 5y ago
    > I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. This is the "As a mom"-argument applied to iq. When it comes to child-rearing mothers will not infrequently claim to know what works best in general because they have had children of their own. I mean an equally valid interpretation of your anecdata is that not all people can learn how to teach mathematics at community colleges.
    • syops 5y ago
      Certainly not all people can learn how to teach mathematics. That is not at all disputable in my mind. I may be in the set of people who can’t learn to teach math. I’ve tried for over 20 years and appear to be just average at it. Maybe I’m below average. My collection of anecdotes that not everyone can learn math works as an anecdote that not everyone can teach math.
  • hnbad 5y ago
    Some people can certainly reach an intuitive understanding of mathematics that will never come naturally to "normals". It's worth noting however that we often consider these people "disabled" (or euphemistically "differently abled"). The point is that there's no genetic dial you can turn from "worse" to "better", it's more like a massive board of switches that feed into each other.
  • SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Here's a thought I've been tossing around: It's a community college, everyone is supposed to pass. At some point at the bottom of intelligence but with motivation to go to school and try and work and do the assignments, meritocracy literally doesn't matter. Because a diploma is needed even for minimum wage jobs. Why penalize people who are trying by failing them out of the simplest classes? Rich idiots fail up, poor idiots end up homeless. No reason to penalize the poor who try when the entire game is arbitrary. This position tends to make certain groups bristle, especially those with a classist sense of "fairness".
    • syops 5y ago
      It does matter in this sense. Students who are poor end up taking on debt for college and this debt is currently (mostly) unforgivable. If we had universal higher education this objection of mine goes by the wayside. But then a new objection rises up.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    > I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. That a well-informed position believes that not (almost) everyone who is attending a college can learn single-variable algebra is fairly depressing.
    • syops 5y ago
      Do you believe everyone can learn algebra? What evidence do you have for this belief? Have you taught in the classroom much to students with a wide range of educational backgrounds? I don’t believe everyone has equal intellectual talent in all areas. My talent for math far exceeds my talent for physics. I’ve tried to learn physics but I just can’t. I have no intuition for it. There is variation amongst our brains and how the connections in our brains formed in childhood. In some people the wiring is such that learning a given topic is not feasible. Such is my belief.
      • sokoloff 5y ago
        Do I believe that everyone should attend college? I do not. Of the people who should attend college, is it frequent that people can't grok single-variable algebra? I'm not disputing your superior experience on this topic (hence "well-informed position"); I'm just saying that it's fairly depressing.
        • syops 5y ago
          In case you don’t know this, community colleges are generally required to accept everyone who applies that has a high school diploma or a GED. We are open enrollment institutions. I understand now what you meant by fairly depressing. Thank you for the clarification.
  • Noos 5y ago
    The problem with learning advanced math is that math is isolated. Like if I learn accounting, I know why I'm learning it; to learn how to create, audit, or read the financial statements of a business. If I learn math, it comes across more as "here are these arcane puzzles you need to solve." Like no one does double entry bookkeeping in the abstract; you learn the history, the methods, etc in the confines of an express purpose. But trying to learn precalc as an adult (which i do get), what's striking is how little purpose or context there is to it. Why do I need to know how to factor imaginary numbers, or know the slope of something? I think math when isolated is a big reason why its so hard to learn. They teach the toolset but people don't have the need to use the tools unless they go into a separate subject.
  • titovodka 5y ago
    I come from a third world country where to graduate high school, you HAVE to take Calculus I, II and little III. Planar Geometry, linear algebra etc. And thats only if you through the Life Sciences track (Biology and Organic Chemistry) I truly don’t believe my people are genetically smarter because we have a truly awful abysmal track history in governing. My guess as an immigrant who went to community college here and then to University here is that students just have too much choices/freedom. They are told they should strive to whatever they want. I and my friends grew up told you need to choose a major that will bring bread on the table, that should be the only priority.
• civilized 5y ago
  Following Biden's inauguration, we've seen a sudden outpouring of mainstream coverage sympathetically highlighting alternatives to woke ideology. Seems to be a lot easier for them to publish it when a Republican isn't President. (I'm definitely not a Republican and I consider the development very positive, but it's been hard not to notice the timing.)
• TulliusCicero 5y ago
  The left often accuses the right of being anti-science -- e.g. on climate change, and now vaccines -- with good reason. But it's true that the left has its own troubles with being opposed to science, and genetic effects on behavior is one example. Being egalitarian-minded, many progressives are inherently hostile to the idea that our personalities and behaviors may be hardwired on some level...except that they don't generally have trouble accepting it for, say, sexual preferences. So it's not even a consistent opposition. To me, the idea that our behavior is a combination of both nature and nurture seems kind of obvious, and the idea that we should refrain from scientific inquiry here because people might use the knowledge improperly feels...wrong. Very wrong.
  • TameAntelope 5y ago
    Surely you see the negative consequences of past inquiry as, at the very least, a cautionary tale? The idea of, "Science at all cost!" should, by now, be thoroughly debunked for a number of very clear reasons, some specifically in this area of genetics and psychology (is there an exception for Poe's Law when talking about genetic behavioral outcomes?). We must be careful, and Dr. Harden does seem to understand that, which is good.
    • TulliusCicero 5y ago
      That doesn't disagree with anything I said. Being careful in scientific inquiry is fine; saying, "we shouldn't research X at all, because maybe the knowledge would be used badly" is not. If there were only possible negatives, it might be more understandable, but of course that's not true. Learning more about how genetics affect behavior could, for example, lead to better treatments for behavioral disorders.
      • TameAntelope 5y ago
        Not every comment needs to disagree with its parent. :)
        • 5y ago
• TameAntelope 5y ago
  I don't think this fundamentally changes how I've thought of the relationship between genetics and experience, specifically because of this line: > [Harden] told me, “As a parent, I try to keep in mind that differences between people are examples of runaway feedback loops of gene-by-environment interaction. People have some initial genetic predisposition to something, and that leads them to choose certain friends over other friends, and these initial exposures have a certain effect, and you like that effect and you choose it again, and then these feedback loops become self-reinforcing.” Feedback loops sound about right, where some tiny minute preference leads to positive reinforcement, leads to more positive reinforcement, until you've got a full blown preference/predilection/talent for something (or the opposite). The idea that genetics play zero role seems silly, but it also makes sense that society shapes the experience of someone with a given genetic combination in a way we can still control. This (very long) article reinforces my belief that society is best off when it finds a place for everyone, and not when it idolizes one set of talents/skills, and acknowledges just how little genetics really matter to be "competent" at any given thing. I very much look forward to reading the book this article is promoting.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  This feels like the “nature versus nurture” false dichotomy all over again. Even the tagline tries to frame the debate as a false dichotomy of two extremist positions: > The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything. Most reasonable people know that human beings are the product of both nature and nurture. Your genes alone won’t make you successful, but they can help (or hurt) your progress in many ways. The article touches on the actual nuance of the debate further down: The real debate seems to be about whether or not the genetic influence should be studied. Opponents argue that studying it could open the door to discrimination or, at the extremes, eugenics. The opponents would rather not look, under the idea that if we ignore it then nobody can use it against us. I don’t find that argument very compelling, and I kind of doubt it’s very common anyway. I think it gets attention because it’s a way to inject controversy into the subject, which is a way to get more clicks.
  • goatlover 5y ago
    Well, in the past we've had eugenics, sterilizations and discrimination based on IQ tests, which is going to the other extreme with genetics. So it's not just something irrelevant. Doesn't mean we should ignore the influence of genetics just because of past wrongs, or because we wish the world to be more egalitarian.
• temp8964 5y ago
  In year 2021, I can tell you, not only genetics is taboo, culture is also taboo now. If an academic dares to say that culture matters in student outcomes (learning, discipline), the person can also get canceled.
  • TMWNN 5y ago
    >In year 2021, I can tell you, not only genetics is taboo, culture is also taboo now. If an academic dares to say that culture matters in student outcomes (learning, discipline), the person can also get canceled. An example of culture mattering is Britain, where you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent: * Indian Hindus * Indian Sikhs * Indian and Pakistani Muslims Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (<http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-focus-slough http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain.
    • selimthegrim 5y ago
      It's not a fair comparison because the Sikhs (mostly rich landowning Jats) and Hindus (mostly Brahmins and Baniyas) coming over have a lot of preselection. Muslims are a) more of a simple random sample b) largely from Mangla dam area in Mirpur in PK case c) part of endogamous lower caste groups (less likely)
      • blacktriangle 5y ago
        How many atrocities does an ideology have to commit before people will admit that the ideology might be a problem?
        • selimthegrim 5y ago
          How did we get from underperforming to atrocities?
• bserge 5y ago
  Why are people jumping from environment straight to genetics? There's so much in-between.
  • gharman 5y ago
    Like what? Serious question, not trying to be snarky. My understanding of these “nature vs nurture” discussions is that environment commonly refers to anything other than genetics - effects not “in-built” that could be caused by upbringing, society, nutrition, etc.
    • steve76 5y ago
      Why does genetics just stop at atoms? An atom or a nucleus can enter excited states. How can we rule that out? Also we limit with one brain. It will be interesting if you looked at genetics of groups, or even the genetics of people in history who influence others from what they wrote and built and left behind. A lot of work. Progressive is defined here as what they are not. Not church. Not military. How about what they are? No rules. Endless ambition. Utilitarianism. Empiricism. Wouldn't it be easier to say that there are rules, as in, it's never okay to burn down your own city and bin Laden doesn't get a vote? Know this. The true heart of progressives isn't nice and tolerant. It's power telling you that you're not allowed to leave prison until you convince me you are going to do everything you can not to end up back here.
• TulliusCicero 5y ago
  > Given the difficulties of distinguishing between genetic and environmental effects on social outcomes, he wrote, such investigations were at best futile: “There will be no reason to pursue these types of research programs at all, and they can be rendered to the same location as Holocaust denial research.” > Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes. This is absolutely disgusting, to blatantly attack scientific inquiry this way. Shame on these reactionaries.
  • nlitened 5y ago
    To be fair, I know quite a bit about how social sciences are done, and most of such research is not reproducible. Nine out of ten social scientists know barely enough statistics to p-hack the outcome into what they want to believe in the first place. I am sure that if first order effects of genes is allowed, you get a never-ending stream of “tall people are diligent”, “blonde people are empathetic” and similar false results that are not only useless, but also might upset general public or sponsors.
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• neonate 5y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20210906184046/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters http://web.archive.org/web/20210906184046/https://www.newyor... https://archive.is/Qs3EL https://archive.is/Qs3EL
• deleted 5y ago
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• stolenmerch 5y ago
  For anyone interested in this topic I highly recommend Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky's book "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst". It does an excellent job showing the nuance and complexity between genetic determinism and social construction. After reading this book I understood the nature vs. nurture debate is somewhat artificial not terribly useful.
• mynameishere 5y ago
  It's always weird to watch people on the left argue about things that are eye-rollingly obvious. But it's true: If progressives get it into their collective heads that genetics are a huge factor in economic, social, and psychological outcomes, eugenics will be right there on the table (again). While conservatives might use this knowledge to stop welfare, progressives will be self-righteously sterilizing people (again). So, the danger is real.
  • wutbrodo 5y ago
    Many (most?) people value conformity and loyalty oaths over honest understanding of the world, regardless of the damage that this does. What you're describing isn't any weirder than Biblical literalists ignoring "eye-rollingly obvious" self-contradictions in scripture. In both cases, the complaint is missing the point: some subset of progressives and some subset of other religious extremists aren't even having the same conversation you are.
• caconym_ 5y ago
  Imagine (semi-publicly) telling a colleague that their field is broadly (morally, by implication) comparable to Holocaust denialism. What an absolute ass. In a sensible world, anybody bringing that kind of attitude into the scientific community would be treated like the social equivalent of a barrel of toxic waste until they learn to act like an adult (in the intellectual sense).
• dgb23 5y ago
  Ironically the realization of us being diverse and having different strengths, weaknesses, goals, perceptions etc. shifted my social/political views stronger towards the libertarian left.
• jl6 5y ago
  I guess the word progressive here isn’t helpful because there’s a huge diversity of thought that gets swept up under that label. But if you take it to mean the intersectional flavor of progressive that focuses on issues of disadvantage and discrimination, then the idea of a generic lottery seems right up their alley. If the genetic lottery has winners and losers, surely that’s pure gold to progressive politics! It’s official, scientific confirmation of the existence of oppressors and victims, along a multitude of axes. And the policy implications are so obvious: equity is achieved by giving extra help to the genetic losers. A whole class of hitherto-wishy-washy political activity suddenly gains scientific cover: the activity of quantifying exactly how much disadvantage each group suffers, and correspondingly how much assistance to render. Why are progressive think tanks not totally on board with this already?!
  • cheesetable 5y ago
    I think it's for fear of appeal to genetics, which has historically been used to justify violations of human rights.
  • luckylion 5y ago
    > Why are progressive think tanks not totally on board with this already?! Possibly because they'd have to completely rewrite their ideological framework. Right now, it's based on active influences (racism, sexism, discrimination against the poor), and with genetics playing a (larger) role, it would shift to more passive influences (fewer women are in tech because they don't care as much for tech as men, not because they're oppressed) that you can't change via revolution + labor camps.
  • ggggtez 5y ago
    This is a clear misunderstanding of practically everything about progressivism. Progressivism is an evolution of liberalism which acknowledges that liberalism had failed to bring the equality it promised. Having scientific proof of differences does nothing. It's not the starting stats that progressives see as the thing that needs to be equalized, but the opportunities. Maybe the outcomes. It depends.
    • 5y ago
• DangitBobby 5y ago
  People strongly want to believe that intelligence doesn't have a strong genetic component, I think mainly for moral reasons. If not everyone can be expected to learn and be proficient in everything due to genetics, then suddenly merit itself is also based strongly on luck, and now the belief that people with greater merit should have better lives no longer seems fair. Intelligence is now just another gift to the fortunate who are destined to have a better life. How can you feel good about using your considerable advantages to the detriment of others if your merit is the result of a jackpot paid out at birth? Even if you believe that with enough time and perseverance you can overcome your lack of intelligence compared to another person, you have to ignore the fact that having to spend more time on something (but actually, everything) than everyone else will put you further and further and further behind everyone else in a way that compounds quickly. Modern society is ostensibly structured this way: the smart will win. If intelligence becomes genetic, it can instead be said that "the lucky will win." And successful people desperately want that to not be the case, because they want to believe they deserve their considerable advantages. And they want to be guilt free about the miserable lives some people lead; it's their fault for being stupid, after all.
  • SilverRed 5y ago
    Even without genetics this problem still exists. What about the people with parents who push their kids harder? What about the people born in areas with better education? You could push these questions all the way to debating if you ever had any free will to begin with or if your whole life was the result of your environment. And ultimately does it even matter what the answers to these questions are? If rewarding people for being smarter drives the population to move towards the goal, then why not keep things like that?
    • DangitBobby 5y ago
      The problem isn't rewarding people for being smarter, it's predatory practices to take advantage of people who don't know any better, or leaving those who will never be smart enough for a really good job to rot in minimum wage hell.
  • 5y ago
• lamontcg 5y ago
  I don't particularly have a problem accepting that intelligence could be genetic. But then people use that to argue that the people at the top deserve everything they have. The exact same argument was made back when we had slavery. Now its just used to justify wage slavery and gross wealth inequality and policies which punish the poor. (It also is grossly oversimplified and discounts reversion to the mean and that two dumb parents can absolutely have a smart kid -- along with the fact that a smart kid born in poverty is going have a much more difficult time getting their net worth up into tends of millions than someone who is just literally born with that much -- plus neglects the effects of e.g. malnutrition on childhood development)
  • colordrops 5y ago
    The main problem with tying specific skills to genetics is that it's not yet possible. We can't even figure out how to get a car to drive itself reliably, and we build the car from scratch. We are not even slightly close to figuring out how genes correlate to advanced complex behaviors that involve learned elements. There are endless factors and interplay between them that determine an already vague concept such as "intelligence". How could you possibly say "these three genes mean you are capable of calculus"? Perhaps you might find some correlations through statistical analysis but that entire in-between is still a blackbox and you can't draw conclusions at all about what is or isn't possible. It wouldn't serve any valuable purpose. The cognitive dissonance is real - it's an echo chamber in here about how self-driving is a pipe dream, and yet a much more difficult problem of determining ability driven by genes is easily swallowed.
    • concordDance 5y ago
      The thing is, you don't need to know in detail how a car works to see that car A is faster than car B or that that self-driving car crashes less than that other one. Similarly, you can tell how much of intelligence is genetic for a given environment (and the "for a given environment" bit is forgotten by so many) by comparing clones (identical twins) to non-clones (non-identical twins). Additionally, sometimes even if you don't understand about how anything happens you can still influence the result. E.g. you don't need to know anything about protein expression and brain development to breed more docile foxes. (Not that I would recommend trying breeding experiments on humans)
• tlear 5y ago
  “ It would assert that the most important difference between the races is racism, with its origins in the horrific institution of slavery only a very few generations ago.” - Ignorance of the world history in this statement is pretty incredible.
  • NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
    I wouldn't put too much weight on it...she's got to say something about racism because of her social environment, so she chose to say something empty and meaningless so she wouldn't have to say something obviously false.
• black_13 5y ago
  This is another form of Calvinism or predestination with a university label on it
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  I tried once to ask reddit's Anthropologists about what cultural artifacts are affected by genetics e.g. how lactose intolerance can affect a local culture. The question was apparently racist and then taken down. What's weird, is that if you believe in equality , you 'd WANT to know the genetic determinants of anything, so you can truly equalize it with genetic engineering.
  • NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
    Anthropology split into science-anthropology and deliberately-rejects-science anthropology a couple decades ago. As I recall, there was a specific meeting of a society that was the cleaving point. For instance, biological anthropologists tend to actually do science, while cultural anthropologists tend to do work that does not rise to that standard. It's too bad that it takes insider knowledge to tell them apart.
    • esyir 5y ago
      I'm reminded of a time back when I was in university where the cultural studies professor vehemently denied the existence of potential genetic differences between two ethnic groups. I don't remember the context any more, but it hella set the stage for my opinion on that field.
      • NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
        Yeah, sad. I wonder what we can do about it. Maybe science-anthro needs a re-branding?
• carabiner 5y ago
  Sperm banks select highly-educated males (i.e. recruiting at Stanford and Harvard) for sperm donors, so it seems obvious that most people know there is a hereditary component.
  • haihaibye 5y ago
    Likewise a "Darwin award" only makes sense if you know intelligence is heritable.
    • HKH2 5y ago
      Haha! Is the heritability of stupidity the same as the heritability of intelligence?
  • ggggtez 5y ago
    Sperm banks select highly educated donors because clients are willing to pay for it. That's all. You are describing capitalism. It's not like these clients are running double blind studies in their wombs.
    • f1refly 5y ago
      Yes, and people are willing to pay for it because they believe in the hereditary component, so that believe must be present in the broad population.
    • rejectedandsad 5y ago
      This is true, and why people like me are considered inherently unworthy. You’re both saying the same thing?
  • lm28469 5y ago
    Going to Stanford or Harvard doesn't mean you're genetically superior though, there are a lot of other things selecting people who go there before ""intelligence""
  • globular-toast 5y ago
• atoav 5y ago
  As a somewhat progressive from the US-perspective (so: European, living in Germany) I don't recall saying genetics didn't impact things. Genetics is just not a lever I am willing to pull in order to influence things. As some of you might recall, the last time Germany tried just that it went into the direction of ultimate genocidal horror. Also there are much more low hanging fruits with a bigger impact on a societies wellbeing (tackling monopolies, corruption, reorganizing work spaces etc.). The reason why people on the left defend against the notion that genetics are everything is because this is the thing fascists use to divide people and make them kill each other. So cool — genetics matter, just like education, nutrition, social situation, security of ones environment etc — but what do we do with this? Argue that some people do rightfully suffer because they chose to have been born into the wrong body? Try to weed out the bad genetics? Who will decide what is bad genetics? The aryan master race? People of color? There are so many other levers we can pull I don't think we need to bring genetics into it from a political improvement perspective. When we think about healthcare that is a different topic.
  • clusterfish 5y ago
    Since when does fascism / alt right need facts to further their agenda? Cutting off research funding for sensitive topics does nothing to stave off our fall into dystopia. If it's ok to do affirmative action based on race, it's also ok to do it based on other genes. I wonder why every progressive in this thread is suddenly afraid of having to discriminate people based on yet-unknown gene factors when their crowd is ok to discriminate based on known skin color (as long as it matches their notion of who should be discriminated against).
    • atoav 5y ago
      > Since when does fascism / alt right need facts to further their agenda? Cutting off research funding for sensitive topics does nothing to stave off our fall into dystopia. Did I say I wanted to cut funding to genetics? What I did was explaining a perspective which I don't share for the most part. What I said is that the idea of willfully designing the shape of a society based on some features of the body (blood, genes, shape of the skull, ...) stands in the tradition of horrible genocides. My grandfather was a Nazi, so this is not some abstract thing for me, but him explaining that e.g. people from the balkan region are "just thieves" because it is "in their blood" would be a thing that he would certainly also read out of genetics. I am all for research of genetics for medical purposes, there lies great potential there. I think exploring links between sociology and genetics is also quite interesting. What I am vehemently against is to divide people based on genetics and make policy based on that alone. > I wonder why every progressive in this thread is suddenly afraid of having to discriminate people based on yet-unknown gene factors when their crowd is ok to discriminate based on known skin color (as long as it matches their notion of who should be discriminated against). I guess american progressives think they need to do this to correct centuries of the pendulum leaning into the other direction. While I aknowledge the fact (centuries of opression against non-white people), I don't agree with the conclusions in extremo. Of course a majority white society has the duty to deal with it's racist heritage pay reparations to the ancestors of that violence and opression etc. If Germany pays reparation to victims of the Holocaust this isn't racism against Germans, it is the pure minimum any decent free society would do. Similarily the significant injustice that has been dealt to native americans or people of color has to be confronted in a serious and fair manner. Giving justice to that injustice can of course look from the outside as if they get a unfair advantage over us who had the luck not to have had such a history. That doesn't feel good, because one has to accept the injustices the own society and nation has done and it lessens our role in the story. But it is necessary.
• NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  In these comments: people doing apologetics for a vision of the world where everyone is born with equal potential. I am a scientist, I work on these things, and I am here to tell you that: --Intelligence is largely (~70-80% of variance) inherited --Your personality is largely determined by genetics and is pretty much settled in to what it will always be by ~30 --If you don't learn to count right by ~4 you never will --There are, in fact, many people who could never learn calculus --Sex differences in behavior are driven by genetics and the effects are large The broad strokes here are not up for debate, and denying them makes you analogous to a flat-earther. The details will change. There are huge portions of the educated populace who will go to great lengths to spin stories about how it ain't so. They do this because it is comfortable to believe given the normative ethics we were all programmed with as children. Trying really, really hard to believe manifest falsehoods has a lot of practical drawbacks, though. Like the constant, expensive performance of searching for just the right way of teaching calculus to people who will never learn it--public policy that hasn't a chance in hell of ever working. If you've read this far, and you're feeling upset or angry or uncomfortable with the facts I've listed, I encourage you to reflect on which problems in the world are really important to you. Write them down. For each one ask, "Is continuing to believe in a broken model of how things actually are going to help me solve this problem? Or would I be better off facing an uncomfortable truth and doing what I can with it?" Thank you for reading my rant, I'll be here all day :-D
  • Tade0 5y ago
    > --Intelligence is largely (~70-80% of variance) inherited Citation needed, especially given that there are enormous differences in intelligence between people who acquired speech and those who didn't.
    • tgv 5y ago
      I think the number of people that haven't acquired overt communication is so low, it can hardly affect the average.
      • Tade0 5y ago
• jti107 5y ago
  my concern is something along the lines of this. imagine that scientists find the genes that makes you predisposed to homosexuality. how long is it before a repressive regime starts testing its citizen and systematically killing anyone with it? should the scientist have still released the study or is there some sort of ethical consideration?
• dibujante 5y ago
  First, can the entire political spectrum learn what "environmentally vs. genetically determined" actually means?
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  Genetics has a huge influence on what someone is predisposed to and what they can achieve. Certain ethnic groups and families, on average, are more likely to have certain traits and less likely to have others. But genetics doesn't matter, in that just because you have "bad" genetics doesn't mean you'll suck, whether it comes to weightlifting, intelligence, temperment, etc. Maybe you won't be in the top 0.0001%, but except for some very specific circumstances, you can defy the average. If you want to know if someone's bad at something, actually testing them is much more accurate than looking at their genetics. If you look at the top 10 distance runners, they're all from Ethiopia and Kenya. But as you look further down the list into the top 100, you start to see Americans and others. Furthermore, the Americans' times are really close to the Ethiopians and Kenyans. So, even if we know for a solid fact that some ethnic group is on average dumber than another, or more violent, it doesn't mean anything. Because it doesn't say anything about the individual people, who vary much more than the difference in averages.
  • pedrosorio 5y ago
    Kenyans, Ethiopians and (white) Americans are not genetically homogenous. Even two siblings can be quite different genetically. The great American distance runners have genetic talent - they didn’t just train harder than their middle school mates who were out of breath while the champions ran faster and longer than anyone else weeks after beginning training.
    • raverbashing 5y ago
      > have genetic talent - they didn’t just train harder than their middle school mates who were out of breath Who knows if it was only due to genes? And more importantly, there isn't a gene that's about running faster. (sure, some genes are helpful and might get you in front - not discounting the work the athlete goes through) Getting to the podium is a mix of several characteristics: Some people might be more prone to muscle recovery/injury resistance. Another one has a better muscle fiber mix. Another one has different muscle attachment positions. And another one feels less pain. Though yes your genetics probably will push you towards a sport. Take the 100m finalists and put them to train marathon (and vice versa) and they'll probably go to the back of the pack even with good training.
• kstenerud 5y ago
  The benefit of course is that without "genetics", and being able to discount "luck" as unmeasurable, one can still cling to "merit" as the single factor that justifies one's elevated station and privileges (once we've stamped out all the -isms). "Merit" is the last Progressive bastion of the modern world's social structure. Even the slogan "Land of opportunity" implies that your own slothfulness is the only thing holding you back from taking your seat among the elites. To lose the meritocracy is to lose the faith (and the country), so it's no wonder that people fight back so fiercely. But avoiding scientific inquiry puts one at a disadvantage, because the research WILL happen with or without you. And if it's without you, you won't have any say in how it's used, or how society restructures itself (because it will). Without your voice, we could end up with Gattaca or Brave New World. With your voice we could have something better. But take note: The world WILL change. You can't stop it, but you can guide it.
• OneTimePetes 5y ago
  Can conservatives be convinced that individual choices and education matter more? God i hate those dissent-sew-click-bait titles. In feudalism, being poor, is your fault. You are morally suspicious, of lower blood and any theory that fits will be used to justify this world order before itself. Thus why national-socialist attracted so many nobles. Thus why "differences" written in stone are so abhorrent to the left. Cause nothing should be written in stone, in a enlightened world. Then, there are differences. But to my mind, the differences are quite universal. Cause those differences were shaped by the environment and the environment was for the last 10.000 - 200 years pretty universal for the species. We have neuro sub-types everywhere, adapted to the ebb and flow of resources and the rise and fall of overpopulation. Somebody optimized to survive a civil-war, might not be optimal for calculus, but might be better at improvisation than someone born into the calm waters of post-(civil-war/genocide) societies. We might even one day learn to suppress the epi-genetic stress triggers that make this wheel go round. We can learn to detect those differences, and learn to work around those differences and it might even benefit us. Or we can shun the "other" - like we already shun those optimized for conflict - and watch the world go down the drain. Cooperation yields higher reward, so research away, but the endgoal should be here to stay.
• ggggtez 5y ago
  I disagree with the premise of the article. It's attacking a straw man. Progressives believe that genetics matter. It's just that they believe other things matter more (such as fairness, equality, etc). The problem is that these research studies tend to narrowly focus on trying to prove that white people are superior. Why? What is this the only question that interests such supposedly academic individuals? It's because, yes, they are Nazis. They can't figure out any questions worth asking that don't boil down to the same old race baiting.
  • deltasixeight 5y ago
    Not in my discussions with most progressives. Most progressives will readily deny reality to uphold their ideology. For example the gender paygap has literally been statistically shown to be negligible when you account for the choices women make (parenthood, for example). Yet it's still a central political rally point for the feminist movement.
  • concordDance 5y ago
    > The problem is that these research studies tend to narrowly focus on trying to prove that white people are superior. Where did you get this impression? Bare in mind that the studies you hear about are the ones that generated some controversy.
• veltas 5y ago
  Show this article to anyone who thinks science isn't political over sensitive issues.
  • ausbah 5y ago
    another contender is the history federal funding of research involving fetal issue and stem cells
• air7 5y ago
  I find myself reading and thinking and quietly ranting about this (and similar) topics often. The reason being that fundamentally I feel we are witnessing an erosion of the acceptance of the scientific method itself. The scientific method simply put is "Truth has more validity then beliefs". Of course we don't have access to Truth so we use evidence as a proxy to Truth via interpretation. Obviously interpretations may vary and even contradict, but that's a good thing and discussion should be encouraged, not censored, as we hopefully stirve towards consensus. In the spirit of this I have no problem with holocaust deniers moon landing truthers etc insofar as the presentation and discussion of evidence is concerned. I think that there should be strong public unacceptance of any kind of scientific discussions being shot down.
  • deltasixeight 5y ago
    No. You don't understand science. Science is about making a hypothesis and then verifying that hypothesis against observations. That's it. One thing to note is that within science and therefore the universe as we know it, no hypothesis can be verified to be 100% true. In other words no statement about the universe can ever be proven true. This occurs due to a number of things. First, all observations have statistical inaccuracies attached to them. Nothing is ever 100% accurate. Thus because observations aren't 100% accurate, observations can never be used to prove a statement with 100% accuracy as a consequence. Second, the universe is unknown and thus at any point in time we can suddenly uncover and observe a completely new piece of evidence that totally invalidates all previous hypothesis. I know what you're talking about in your post. But when you truly understand science you will see that the line between truth and belief is actually really blurry. Science has given us zero verified truths. It has only given us probabilities and likelihoods that we just assume (aka believe) to be true. In fact the foundations of science function off axiomatic assumptions that logic is real and probability is real. These two aspects of reality can NEVER be verified as they are the tools we use to verify other things.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• huibv 5y ago
  I've always assumed that (intelligent) progressives know this the same way they know many other things but they would never admit it publicly.
• cm2187 5y ago
  I think Charles Murray's position is misrepresented here. At least in his latest book (Facing reality), he doesn't talk about genetics (of which he is not a specialist), but about inheritable characteristics. His point is that you don't know where the cursor is between genes and early education/environment, but since you can't take children away from their parents at birth, the distinction doesn't really matter from a public policy point of view. He doesn't say that genes (or early environment) is the only thing that matters either, and points at evolution in the IQ distribution over time, and takes the argument that if you were to put an "asian tigger mum" behind each children, you would most likely get an impact on scores. For those interested, his debate with Coleman Hughes is interesting [1]. Coleman makes an good objection. He says that these studies on variations in IQ distributions may or may not be correct, but that we shouldn't publicise them because most people are incapable of thinking in term of distributions, and will treat an individual differently based on one of the metrics (mean, percentile, standard deviation) of whichever way you cut the population. I am conflicted on that. On one side I oppose the idea that you shouldn't look at the facts because the facts could be misused (the "chemistry is bad because Zyklon B" argument). On the other hand I have seen enough educated and smart enough people incapable of thinking in term of distribution to acknowledge that Coleman has a point. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE5QcD_12fQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE5QcD_12fQ
• concordDance 5y ago
  This is an important subject but it's also toxic, particularly with political headlines like this which I don't think should be on Hacker news. Better to focus on the science.
  • abvdasker 5y ago
    This is a story which was likely written at the behest of the publisher as a pre-release book review. Harden's participation -- and her own book by the sound of it -- is explicitly political. To read between the lines a bit more one can infer that Harden is trying to build a brand beyond academia. My point being that the principal scientist in the piece is no longer just a scientist, so it's appropriate to widen the scope. I agree with you though that the headline, much of the article, and arguably some of Harden's presentation of her work is irresponsible.
• ausbah 5y ago
  the question I have is why shouldn't we believe that works in these areas might not be used as justification for deterninal policies a la eugenics? what is different this time around to prevent someone with power from using some research results to advance discriminatory policies (even if the results are overblown, purposefully misinterpreted, etc.)? ignoring the science isn't great, but using the science as a basis for creating policy is still a very scary idea
• blast 5y ago
  Chomsky wrote the definitive progressive answer to all this 50 years ago: https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20blocks%20new%20class%20system.pdf https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20block... Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve. Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true - assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research - even if it is true (a phrase he uses a lot). Since not one of his arguments depends on Herrnstein's scientific claims being false, the issue of science denialism never comes up with Chomsky. He lets his opponents have everything they "ask" for empirically ("even if it is true") and refutes them on other grounds. This must partly be because (ironically?) he's smarter than most people (including most other progressives) and therefore wasn't about to walk into the trap the left finds itself in 50 years later - a trap which must be tightening, if an article like the OP appears in the New Yorker of all places. But there must be more to it than this. I think the progressives who find themselves having to challenge this research as false (rather than inconsequential and insignificant, as Chomsky does), actually share many of the ideological and meritocratic assumptions that Chomsky writes about - for example the assumption that wealth and power must necessarily flow to those with higher IQ. They don't want to give up this assumption because they belong to the meritocracy themselves (or are part of the class that identifies that way). Because of this, they can't accept Chomsky's argument much more than the Herrnsteins can.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    > assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research, even if it is true - a phrase he uses a lot. Absolutely true. Even if it's true, the society should not give ammunition to closet racists with their attempts to stealthily legitimise racism. Equally so, in the current immigration debacle, we need to call things their own names. What these people mean, but don't say out loud for the fear of instant character assassination by being called out for racism is that they don't want brown people in their countries. New Yorker bought into this, unfortunately. The author does not want to "help" racial minorities, she wants to label them dumb, an needing compassion, which in reality will lead to even more strong ostracism, and stigmatisation. Nobody have to be "scientifically established to be dumb, and biologically inferior." That's right out of 3rd reich's playbook.
• de_keyboard 5y ago
  I've always thought the "progressive" position was this: 1. Genetics, upbringing and culture all matter 2. Diversity within an ethnic group is extremely large - often similar magnitude to diversity between ethnic groups 3. Therefore, to judge someone on their ethnic average will be inaccurate at best, offensive at worst I think that this position has been misconstrued by pop-right / alt-right figures to create a false narrative in the culture wars.
  • automatic6131 5y ago
    If you read the article, you'd see there are "progressives" in positions of power of what science is funded and what isn't, who take the position that genetics don't matter at all, and any research into them is done because it's motivated by rightist hatred of minorities.
    • hnbad 5y ago
      I think dismissing that as "progressives being progressives" is dishonest. Most scientific research into eugenics, "racial differences" and such is motivated by reactionary value systems. Most of it can also easily be classified as pseudoscience and is published in fringe journals (e.g. see Emil Kirkegaard's "research" and his "journals"). Since this topic is so overrun with reactionaries trying to scientifically justify their views, it's extremely risky for a serious journal to publish research into it and for institutions to fund this research in the first place. Because in all likelihood that reasonable accredited scientist prompting you about wanting to do the research is either personally pursuing such ideological goals or representing the interests of such a group. In other words, because of all the incredibly unscientific "research" actual racists and eugenicists have done in this field before, it's extremely hard to do any work in this field without either risking being perceived as supporting their views (by opponents) or as validating their unscientific prior work (by supporters). It's a bit like debating the Israel-Palestine conflict: if you criticize Israel for their actions in Palestine, you might have genuine human rights concerns or you might just do so as a proxy for anti-Semitism. If the people doing the latter wouldn't exist (and there wasn't such an obvious historical precedent for why they're scary) it wouldn't be such a hot button issue. Go ask a leftist how this usually plays out for them.
• jhoechtl 5y ago
  Even if progressives can be convinced that genetics matters (re-using the OPs title), what next? In how far shall this insight be used to re-consider our living-together? Shall this lead to a scientifically backed reason to stigmatize groups? Shall this lead to a blessed segregation of people? Would this lead to a better co-existance of people or a worse one?
  • yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
    Perhaps this could lead to less political polarisation and extremism? Perhaps Western society could come to terms with the idea that an observation of the state of the universe might not necessarily imply some kind of political or moral position? That is at least what I'm hoping for.
  • rejectedandsad 5y ago
    We already segregate people based on intelligence, it’s called selective school admissions (and Google HC). People like me are left out for good reason - we simply are genetically defective. Unfortunately I don’t see much way out of this outside of exiting society (and perhaps life) permanently.
• nightwing 5y ago
  We need an experiment: create 100 clones of Terence Tao, wait until they become adults, and see how many of them become great scientists.
  • concordDance 5y ago
    This sounds like a great experiment I'd love to see happen but that's also impossible in the current regulatory environment.
    • nightwing 5y ago
      That's true, but i hope if more people talk about it, and if techniques similar to cloning [1] get used more often in medicine, it will become possible. [1] https://www.britannica.com/science/three-parent-baby https://www.britannica.com/science/three-parent-baby (nuclear transfer)
• hnbad 5y ago
  This article gives me big "progressives don't know that a penis is not a vagina" energy. Except for a very small lunatic fringe minority, progressives generally aren't saying genetics "don't matter", they're saying that they shouldn't. Someone might have a neurological learning disability for example but that doesn't mean you should disregard them but accommodate them to the fullest extent possible. Sorry for the following tangent but I promise it's relevant: There is a lot of "progressivism" in the media where "not saying color" is portrayed as a solution to racism but this has become so ubiquitous that even conservatives have started copying this line. That's because it doesn't actually address the underlying impact of racism, it just hides it and makes acknowledging its connection to "color" a social faux pas. At this point progressives are the ones saying "race absolutely exists and is tied to someone's physical reality", where they disagree with race realists is the degree to which race is a useful concept outside addressing racism (where it is necessary because you can't talk about racial discrimination without acknowledging that people are being grouped into racial categories). Same with sexism, sex and gender differences. That something is a "social construct" doesn't mean it can't interact with physical realities -- "species" is a social construct but it's obvious almost any way you look at it that there is some kind of utility in grouping creatures into "hamster" or "human". She mentions autism and deafness as examples for genetic differences but it's progressives who are the ones pushing the concept of "neurodiversity", i.e. accepting that there ARE differences between the way human minds work and that we should be more accepting of people whose minds work differently (e.g. some autistics being bad at reading social cues but intuitively engaging in systems thinking). Traditional mainstream liberalism again pushed the opposite approach, of treating disabled people not as disabled but "differently abled" (again, a viewpoint now often propagated by conservatives when celebrating individuals who "overcome" their disability, setting an expectation for others to do the same rather than ask for affordances), thus encouraging a view that ignores their need for accommodations and not engaging with the idea of what affordances are or aren't socially normalized and what is seen as a "burden" (because it only benefits a marginalized group) vs a "necessity" (because it benefits the dominant group). A lot of this discourse was recently fueled by companies making accommodations because of COVID that they had previously dismissed as impossible and unreasonable when disabled or neurodivergent people asked for them. So yes, it can absolutely be true simultaneously that genetics can have a massive impact on an individual while the effects are overshadowed by in-group variation. No two people are created equal, yet we should not use that as an excuse to disempower or elevate arbitrary groups but ensure they are given equally the affordances they need to participate in society and contribute what they can. And sadly where we've done so in the past we need to compensate for the generational harm they have been burdened with.
• tomhoward 5y ago
  My own experience suggests that whilst yes, genetics is an important factor in life outcomes, other things that are hugely important also aren't adequately researched, because genetic determinism is so widely accepted. I've been experimenting with some self-improvement techniques for nearly 10 years. I found them after a few years of personal crisis and a quest for understanding, as I was very confused at what was causing my inconsistent life success/happiness/satisfaction/health. I'd had plenty of cases where I'd done well in life (in school work, career, friendships, relationships, sport, physical health) and plenty of other cases where I'd done terribly. "Trying harder" didn't seem to improve things, and in many cases made things worse. It didn't make sense that it was all explained by hard-coded genetics, as, well, it made no sense that my patterns were selected for by evolution, and it was hard to understand how genetics had given me a brain that was quite good at things one week but terrible at the very same things the next. And it didn't seem like these tendencies mirrored either of my parents'. It sometimes did seem like sometimes it was one parents' tendencies competing/conflicting with the other's, but other times the patterns seemed completely unlike anyone in my family. Genetic determinism just made no sense as an explanation, even after multiple doctors/psychiatrists said some version of "that's just how you're wired". Just by chance I ended up connecting with a practitioner who practiced a form of "subconscious emotional healing", and whilst I was skeptical I was exasperated and open to trying anything at that point. After starting these practices, I felt immediate relief to a lot of the anxiety and fear I was feeling, and over time, all aspects of my life have gradually improved. A particularly significant example of how this work has been beneficial has been in my career, and particular instances where I needed to learn a skill or deal with a challenge, and was finding myself very stuck, but by undertaking the healing work I was able to let go of the fear/anxiety/resistance I was feeling, then I found I was easily able to learn the skill or work through the obstacle, and have ended up being able to increase my capabilities and progress my career much more effectively. I've also been able to have a much better time with friendships, relationships, and my physiological health. Some notable experts on the topic, such as Gabor Maté, assert that deeply held emotions like trauma influence our genetic expression, a mechanism known as epigenetics [1]. Others heavily dispute the role of epigenetics or the possible effectiveness of "subconscious healing" in altering life outcomes. It all seems to be derided as nonsense among conventional biomedical professionals and devotees. The thing is, I don't see any significant research either proving or disproving anything in this area, but I do see plenty of non-mainstream practitioners and individuals undertaking this kind of work and having really good outcomes. I’ve often thought of trying to gather data on my own progress, of physiological indicators and perhaps even IQ tests, but it’s hard to get any meaningful testing done when you’re just a guy who reckons he’s onto something. But it seems like an important thing to study, because, unlike genetic determinism, it has the potential to substantially change life outcomes for people living today. When I think about the times in my life when I was struggling, particularly as a deeply confused/terrified school student wondering why I was making my teachers and parents happy one week and disappointing them the next, and realise how much of it was influenced by the subconscious emotions that it's taken until now to identify and resolve, my heart breaks for the many people still experiencing those kinds of feelings, but believing or being told that they can't hope for anything better due to society's embrace of genetic determinism. If anyone reading this happens to be working in fields related to epigenetics or behaviour-change, or is connected with anyone who is, and wants to talk to someone who has spent 10 years undertaking emotional healing work with great success, please feel free to get in touch. [1] https://drgabormate.com/trouble-dna-rat-race/ https://drgabormate.com/trouble-dna-rat-race/
• globular-toast 5y ago
  You can't convince people of something they already know. It's the same reason arguing with religious people is futile. It's a mistake to assume people only deny things they believe are untrue. One thing you will notice is how if you do say IQ is genetic, certain people will call you racist. This strikes me as very similar to looking up rude words in the dictionary. There are things you know and you know others know, but you never mention. Most of the time that's because there's no reason to mention it. There's no point talking about uncomfortable things just because you can. What's worrying is when something actually important but still can't be talked about.
• mola 5y ago
  Oh, so now eugenics is hip again? Ofcourse genetics influence stuff, but so what? Does being less good at something means you are less human or less worthy? Does belonging to a population with certain traits an individual have those traits? Humanity has gone through this road before, it turned out ugly, why do we need to actively persue a narrative that focuses on biological determinism given that it proved to be an extremely dangerous narrative? And yes, this is a narrative, even when we find scientific evidence for facts that support this narrative, the organization of these facts and acting on them is always mediated by narratives which fill in the gap about the things we don't really know which are not these very specific facts. The framing of the title here is a nice example for this fallacy. What are progressives that the title is mentioning? Is it an actual organised thought, or just some tribal strawman? It's just a narrative, and narratives are very effective in creating reality, we should be careful about them and not consider them just a force of nature we can't and shouldn't control. Exactly like how we as individuals don't blindly accept a determinism about our actions and abilities. So we shouldn't accept it for us as a society.
  • dash2 5y ago
    As nobody has made any of the claims you are attacking - least of all the impeccably left wing Paige Harden - I can't help wondering whether you've read the article.
  • anonymoushn 5y ago
    The article mentions specific people. Do you think those people are not progressives?
• xibalba 5y ago
  If Chomsky’s solutions are bunk, what is the value of his argument? See also: the last 250 years of economic history.
  • Ma8ee 5y ago
    And 250 years of economic history shows that unhindered capitalism is a disaster. The only reason capitalism appears so so successful is because it has been balanced with more progressive policies.
    • wahnfrieden 5y ago
      And massive corporate welfare
    • Lord_Baltimore 5y ago
      "Unhindered capitalism" "it has been balanced with more progressive policies." That doesn't sound like unhindered capitalism.
      • Ma8ee 5y ago
        Times when capitalism has been unhindered have led to market crashes, galloping inequality and depressions. Times when capitalism has been balanced with progressive policies have led to stability and growth, not only for the already rich.
        • goatlover 5y ago
          So that sounds like a mixed economy is best where capitalism provides the growth and progressive policies counter balance the bad tendencies.
          • sudosysgen 5y ago
            That's certainly a respectable opinion, yes, but some believe that these progressive policies are only possible temporarily or in countries that use various legal and kinetic means to maintain an advantage over other countries, etc..., so it's not a settled question that social democracy is the end of history.
• midjji 5y ago
  Genetics are discussed as social issue instead of as a missing practical technology, only because the tech isnt there yet. But it will be and soon, and once it is the left will embrace it like they did with prenatal vitamins. Embryo genediting and embryo selection works just fine, and the databases required to find polygene traits are beeing created, the techniques required beeing researched. Even today there are dozens of genetic traits that are screened for, and the parents given the choice to abort, or in the case of IVF, to pick another embryo for implantation. And people do abort, if given the screening and the choice. Trisomys like downs are going away in civilized countries, with more than 99% abortion rates. Religion can slow progress down, but nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop parents from wanting the best for their kid, or more specifically the kid they will have. Genetics and the impact on society is a fascinating topic, as is the identification of genetic traits and the experiment methodology. But the popular discussion is profoundly stupid. People seem to forget that we arent discussing how to order the society of the last century, this is all about preparing for the next one. Parents will fight over what skin color their kid will have, and the kid may disagree and change it, but only cultists will fight over if the kid should be in the optimal health, or have a low IQ.
  • laverya 5y ago
    > But it will be and soon, and once it is the left will embrace it like they did with prenatal vitamins. Embryo genediting and embryo selection works just fine, and the databases required to find polygene traits are beeing created, the techniques required beeing researched. https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection is a good overview of how practical this is today, IME. TL;DR: Selection is barely worth it at reasonable valuations of IQ points, but will be massively worth it in the future due to improvements in models and the ongoing reduction in price of polygenetic screenings. I believe this was last updated in 2016, though. https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-editing https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-editing for the babies of the "far future", or maybe 25 years from now.
• yodsanklai 5y ago
  > The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything. Try to have a nuanced view on covid mitigation strategies and you'll feel the same way. Even on HN which encourages rationality. There are lot of very polarized topics where it's pretty much impossible to have a rationale conversation. I have the feeling pretty much everybody choose what they want to believe and then build a rationalization to justify their views. Pretty depressing.
• vmception 5y ago
  > Harden was surprised that she’d elicited such rancor from someone with whom she was otherwise in near-total political agreement. This matches my observations for the last half decade, but more so from progressives and left leaning people. Any deviance from "the narrative" results in instant ostracizing! Other political groups just make excuses to walk away for the time being, in my experience, which isn't inherently good either, but better than this. There was a study on twitter that quantified this: left leaning people do not follow right leaning people, right leaning people follow left leaning people. One group has only a caricature of the other, while the other has a clearer picture of the opposition party's belief set. I really hate the idea that people must be blocked if they didn't reach the same conclusions. It assumes that people are static, irredeemable deplorables even if they weren't exposed to the viewpoint by that point in their life. Harkening back to an old campaign point from the left also half a decade ago. Then of course there is the assumption that I must therefore be "on the right", especially given the adjectives I used as well as being frustrated more with the left. Which is why the ostracizing occurs for questioning anything, nobody considers the possibility of an "ally" having introspection, or the possibility of evaluating the world outside of a false dichotomy? Super productive, everyone.
• swebs 5y ago
  This is really more of a science-religion issue than a science-science one. It is more akin to Galileo being tried for heresy for claiming that the sun is the center of the solar system. Though in this case the religion is progressivism. And the keystone of progressive dogma is that "All groups are born completely equal and any achievement difference is the result of racism by white people or sexism by men." And if it could be proven scientifically that this is not the case (which it has been [1]) then the whole ideology collapses. If you've ever tried to convince someone to disregard a deeply held religious belief, you know how much of an uphill battle it can be. And it can be downright impossible for the more zealous, especially if they believe they're constantly battling some sort of "other" (mostly theoretical Nazis). It doesn't look like things will be getting better any time soon. In fact, with the increase of deplatforming and ideology-driven power mods on social media sites like Reddit, it seems like we're moving into a sort of digital dark age. [1] https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense...
  • Applejinx 5y ago
    It's understandable for people to collectively react negatively to genocidal tropes getting pushed once more with great enthusiasm. This shit never goes away, and Nazis were not in the least theoretical: one could say what made Nazis Nazis was a game plan, one that's very specific. Also, the keystone of progressive dogma is that there is VALUE in the wellbeing of all types of people, contrasting with conservative dogma that hierarchy is both inevitable and deeply moral: that there are and will always be underpeople, which must be kept in their place. Progressive dogma is more akin to your basic Ratatouille trope: that the good idea, the new concept, the innovation can come from ANYWHERE. I think that's a defensible position, and it puts a completely different spin on the idea of not starving the underpeople to death or killing them outright.
    • swebs 5y ago
      >progressive dogma ... contrasting with conservative dogma That's a false dichotomy and really the core of my complaint. Instead of dogma, we should be striving towards facts based on empirical evidence. Science.
• tomp 5y ago
  Shame on you, this is a "no true scotsman" argument. "I don't want to argue X but proceeds to argue X" is a common yet despicable rhetoric trick.
  • croon 5y ago
    Not OP, but no it's not. For example; are the Nordics or most of Europe socialist? If they are and are functioning it means it can work. If they are not, maybe people have differing opinions of what socialism entails. What usually is a "no true scotsman" argument is when someone only calls something socialist when it's not working, because if an implementation is working that would deflate the argument. See a few posts above.
    • FiberBundle 5y ago
      > are the Nordics or most of Europe socialist? Absolutely not. They are primarily market based with a relatively large welfare state. How is that even a question?
      • croon 5y ago
        Because that is what most "socialists" want, meaning your definition of socialism and theirs are probably very different.
        • zozbot234 5y ago
          Well, we could call that "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics" for the sake of clarity. Though I'm not sure if that's what most socialists understand socialism as.
        • detaro 5y ago
          Is that what "socialists" want, or what people that get called "socialists" by detractors want?
          • 5y ago
• yadaeno 5y ago
  IQ is misunderstood by most people and the common misconceptions are extremely harmful. In reality IQ matters much less than people think. The top 5 rated chess player of all time (Hikaru Nakamura) has a ~105 IQ. People with an average IQ are capable of performing at the 0.1% level with the proper structured training and time. In my experience IQ mostly impacts the rate at which you learn things. So it took you 2 years instead of 1.5 to master a certain skill -- so what? As a society we should put more emphasis on hard work and results, and less on inherant traits.
  • strikelaserclaw 5y ago
    more like iq is a crude measure of human intelligence
    • yadaeno 5y ago
      And intelligence is no more than a crude guideline for determining human potential. The fixation on intelligence is a reflection of a culture that don't recognize hard work and is ultimately lazy. We don't want to put in the grueling effort it takes to master, and hone a craft over decades. We would rather cash in on "genetic lottery" points for the rest of our lives. You see people bragging about their university or SAT score from 30 years ago, but have accomplished nothing since then. I have no moral objection with studying IQ among individuals and groups. But I think compared to other factors that influence human potential, it is the least interesting and least actionable. It also perpetuates the myth that it really matters on an indivual level.
  • 1980phipsi 5y ago
    IQ matters less than people think at some things, like chess. However, it does matter for other things, like mathematical analysis. Moreover, there is a correlation between IQ or proxies of IQ (like test scores) and income. While it isn't a super-strong relationship, there are few other variables that have as strong an impact.
    • yadaeno 5y ago
• inglor_cz 5y ago
  Having grown up in a rust belt mining city and having gone to school with a lot of non-intellectual classmates, I can say that "regular people" are much more ready to accept inborn differences in mental abilities as self-evident (similarly to, say, facial beauty) than intellectuals themselves. Smart and highly accomplished people, on the other hand, often try to deflect, dispute, water down and distract, once the topic of heritability of intelligence comes up. To a part this is given by the fact that intelligence is a hard topic, but I wonder to which degree this semi-denial is psychological. Smart people might resent the possibility that part of their success could be traced back to random unearned biological privilege that cannot even be taxed and redistributed. "Just World fallacy" is an attractive one, especially in a society that verbally celebrates equality and equity.
• Applejinx 5y ago
  The problem here is not study of genetics, but the tacit assumption that society must be constructed for the elevation of whatever the 'best' is, and the suppression and destruction of the 'worst'. The rest is just where you place the line, and if you grant that, you are establishing the threshold for genocide. Things would be a bit simpler if the argument wasn't 'never talk about any differences among people', but 'never place that line, because society is not constructed for the destruction of the least among it'. It is NOT an inevitable requirement that society is constructed for the destruction of the least among it.
  • HKH2 5y ago
    Curtis Yarvin makes an argument very similar to that. I can't find where I read it though.
    • Applejinx 5y ago
      How odd. I daresay if he does, it's the only thing we ever agree on in our whole entire lives :)
• nsajko 5y ago
  The article is too fluffy to bother reading, and it seems like it may be just attacking straw men. TLDR, maybe; with interesting facts, if any?
• ashtonkem 5y ago
  As an academic matter, maybe. As something that we should make decisions based on, either as individuals or as a society, hell no. The benefit to society seems quite scant, but the risk of having such system taken over by a eugenicist is quite high.
  • concordDance 5y ago
    A potential benefit is figuring out how to make us smarter. For instance, let's say for the sake of argument that a group of people who all have gene seem to have lower IQ. We research the gene and discover it's a malformed enzyme that doesn't function as well. We give them all free supplements of the enzyme and as a result they get back to average IQ and everyone is better off.
• hellothere1337 5y ago
  You can see how much genetics matter with how people treat ugly/deformed people. They pretend they're not biased while forcing you to jump through hundreds of hoops to prove yourself and then gaslight you into saying looks dont matter.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Progressives know genetics matter, e.g. there are essentially zero people with downs in Denmark because laws stipulate that you must genetically test the unborn. Those few that make it through this eugenics program are the result of false negatives.
  • detaro 5y ago
    Denmark doesn't have a testing requirement, nor are people only born with downs if a test failed. (It does have very high testing rates and corresponding high rate of subsequent abortions though)
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-las... Universal screening had unintended eugenic consequences. That scientific fact isn’t controversial, what is controversial is to say whether it was good or bad.
      • detaro 5y ago
        Yes, this confirms what I said?
• xyzzyz 5y ago
  The problem is that socialism inevitably leads to authoritarianism through its very nature. See, for example, Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”, where he lays this case pretty extensively.
  • cloudfifty 5y ago
    That's not some objective fact. Furthermore you realise that Hayek himself wasn't a democrat?
    • zepto 5y ago
      It’s an empirical fact.
      • cloudfifty 5y ago
        No it's not. "Leads to" signifies that something turns into it. The regimes that are commonly referred to never turned authoritarian, they started authoritarian - much to Chomsky's and other libertarian socialists dismay.
        • zepto 5y ago
          Ok, I’ll give you that distinction. Socialism inevitably is authoritarian.
          • cloudfifty 5y ago
            That's luckily easy for anyone to discover is incorrect by a half-arsed google search and a somewhat honest attitude to learning.
            • zepto 5y ago
              A Google search will tell you what people would like socialism to be. Empirical examples tell you what it is. You’ve already agreed with this.
• oliwarner 5y ago
  Matter to whom? If we're talking about personal decision making, dig in, help me improve myself, warn me what to look out for... But too many of these conversations are actually masking conversations about trying to charge more or outright deny opportunities to people who are deemed to have inferior genes.
  • x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
    And let's be honest, it's not about "genes" it's more about right-wingers looking for a scientific reason to deny equal protection to groups they deem inferior.
• namaria 5y ago
  I think a Greek guy was warning us about extremism some 2000 years ago...
• dado3212 5y ago
  > “ She directed me to a comprehensive World Bank data set, released in 2020, which showed that seventy-two per cent of inequality at the primary-school level in the U.S. is within demographic groups rather than between them.” Anyone have a source for this?
• dennis_jeeves 5y ago
  And now I'm going to be breeding some wolves into dogs, and chimps into humans.