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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 ha

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.
  - hnbad 5y ago
    Sure, there isn't a gene that makes you run faster, but no matter how hard you train, you'll have a hard time beating Michal Phelps unless you're also naturally built like Michael Phelps: https://www.biography.com/news/michael-phelp-perfect-body-swimming https://www.biography.com/news/michael-phelp-perfect-body-sw... The point isn't that there is a "best" set of genes. The point is that there can be genetic advantages or disadvantages. Physical reality has an impact on experiential reality. Where it gets dangerous is when people start using this as an argument for eugenics or an "ought" rather than "is" (i.e. constructing hierarchies out of physical attributes).
    - Noos 5y ago
      Yeah, considering the actual day to day life of all people, Michael Phelps's genetic advantages are pointless. They confer advantage only in a specifically designed field that society has created and that is really a tremendous waste of time all things considered; it's just a performance. But the aim of all this genetic stuff is not saying "well, Kenyans can make better marathon runners if we stick them into a sports contest." It's usually a lot more pernicious than that, and involves intelligence. And ordering society in some manner around genetic expressions in a way a lot more dangerous than recognizing some people are better at public performance than others.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      The US military routinely tests recruits for IQ and assigns roles appropriate to that level. They even outright reject some people for being too stupid. Nobody seems to be up in arms about it, why? We also already do all sorts of soft eugenics in our own lives, from assortative mating to academic scores and schools one attends, social circles that one enters because of their achievements and so on. At some point it will become a lot more quantitive, to reduce the currently large factor of luck. Societies that refuse to take advantage of optimizations this could bring will eventually lose out, for better or worse, this is entirely inevitable. The progress of technology is not always progressive. There is a reason most of sci-fi reads downright dystopian.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
- armchairhacker 5y ago
  True, but the talent isn't as obvious. Similarly, you could have two very slow runners give birth to a fast runner, and most of their speed would ultimately come down to getting the right recessive genes. Almost every trait, even willpower itself, is influenced by genetics. But for most traits it's very difficult if not impossible to reliably determine what genes influence what. Most things aren't determined by one gene, they're influenced by many genes, as well as randomness and your environment.
esyir 5y ago
The catch here would be thinking in distributions, and from that separating individuals from said distributions. A current topic would be representation within a given domain. Particularly since in most representation cases (high paying jobs, celebrities, top universities, etc), we're already looking at the tails of the distribution. There, small shifts can heavily affect the quantity of users in the right tail, especially for domains with stronger requirements (see your case with the runners). Of course I won't try to discount potential cultural impact, but anyone trying to sell you a story of how it's all nature or all nurture is typically spouting bullshit.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  But it's a bad idea to compare the world's fastest runners with people getting high paying jobs - that's the main point of the GP's comment. Even for something as clearly and uncontroversially genetically influenced as running ability, the group differences only really matter for the top 100 people out of 7 billion. If you look at top 100k runners, the group differences are almost entirely gone. Even more, the top 100k runners are probably within a second or two of each other - entirely irrelevant if you were to hire based on a bar of performance, and not some elitist concept of hiring the very best possible.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Socially, who makes it to the top hundred matters a lot. We can know only so many people by name: Nobel awardees, composers like Bach and Dvořák. Our own brain capacity for knowledge makes us concentrate on the top 100s. While the 100k top scientists do matter scientifically, they do not matter culturally.
  - marcusverus 5y ago
    > Even for something as clearly and uncontroversially genetically influenced as running ability, the group differences only really matter for the top 100 people out of 7 billion. Sure, but there is no social contention arising from racial differences in the world's fastest runners. What gets us in trouble are the the racial differences in high-prestige jobs. To really understand the impact of differences in distributions, you need to look at some numbers. The excerpt below comes from Douglas Murray's new book. I am not going to attempt to convince you that racial differences in IQ exist. But he makes a strong case that if such racial differences did exist, the impact on the distribution of high-prestige jobs would be absolutely enormous: "...Why are there so few minorities in these high-prestige jobs? It's a numbers game in which the odds are against a Latin (he uses geographic indicators in place of the colloquial 'black' and 'white', and 'latin' in place of 'hispanic') achieving one of those positions are high and the odds against an African are prohibitive, even if we assume that there is no racism whatsoever among the employers for high-prestige jobs. To illustrate, I'll use the cohort of young Americans ages 25-29, the age at which the potential candidates for such jobs are coming out of law schools, medical schools, business schools, and graduate STEM departments. In 2019, there were 23.2 million Americans in that age group. About 228,000 people in that age group can be expected to have IQs of 135 or over. The racial distribution of Americans ages 25-29 in 2019 was more multiracial than among the older population. Only 54% were European while 20 percent were Latin, 15 percent were African, and 6 percent were Asian. But that reduced dominance of Europeans in total population doesn't make a lot of difference in the 135+ pool. Employers seeking these exceptionally intelligent young adults were choosing from a pool that contained about 2,800 Africans [~1%] and 9,500 Latins [~3%] compared to 50,700 Asians [*~22%*] and 160,000 Europeans [~70%]." [~3% being 'other'] So, while the marginal IQ differences between individuals do not matter not one whit, when considered at the population level, these differences can hardly be ignored.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
> 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 The Americans still almost certainly have very favourable genetics for distance running, they're just less favourable than the genetics of the Kenyan runners. If you compared the American runners in the top 100 against the average American I would be very surprised if they had similar physical attributes (Lung capacity, muscle fibers, etc).
- dmingod666 5y ago
  America in this case is a very bad country to measure with considering the amount of people that may actually be of very similar decent as your first examples..
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    East Africa and West Africa aren't the same places
Tenoke 5y ago
Sure, that's a good point generally but doesn't seem at all the problem the article is addressing. Skimming it, it's about progressives denying group differences at all and calling those who research them 'equivalent to Holocaust Deniers'. From following genetics research and researchers, I've seen plenty of that, and I don't see the relevance of your point here.
- simonh 5y ago
  The research isn't specifically about group differences, or differences between populations anyway. That issue inevitably gets all the attention, but it's just one dimension. The vast majority of genetic differences between any two individuals have nothing to do with whatever arbitrary groups society categorises them with, and most genetic differences that do correlate with anything like race are basically cosmetic. Nevertheless genetic differences can make a huge difference to individuals. Many factors we uncontroversially categorise as disabilities have a genetic basis. In UK schools children categorised as on the Autism spectrum, or dyslexic receive additional support and consideration with regard to exam rules. I don't want to sideline into an argument about to what extent these specifically have a genetic basis, but broadly if we are going to agree that such factors are taken into account, it's flat out incoherent to then ignore or deny research into the origins, characteristics and influence of these factors.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    The backlash by progressives is usually specifically centered around the group differences part. And I don't buy that's the one that gets all the attention - all the negative one maybe, but most accepted and talked about genetic research isn't about that at all.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Different ethnic groups have meaningful difference in various allergies and disease risks, but that doesn’t get attention from the general public. That stuff is basically all interesting but largely meaningless because it’s so binary. It doesn’t matter if your part of a group that’s 10x as likely to be lactose intolerant, you are either lactose intolerant or your not. Sure the dairy industry might care, but the only impact on individuals is what they can bring to very large family gatherings. Even where it is actually meaningful to an ethnic group, people rarely from a single ethnic group. A large chunk of African Americans are whiter genetically than their black.
YetAnotherNick 5y ago
Genes describe lot of things from obese tendency to height to IQ to your looks. If someone has an IQ of 70, there are very likely to live a difficult life. Yes IQ is not intelligence you will say but still there is a limit to everyday functioning if someone's IQ is low. Ask a conventional ugly person(specially female) about their life.
- Sholmesy 5y ago
  I agree with you, but an IQ of 70 is mentally disabled, so it's not really a good example of "bad" genetics, so much as it is an example of a disability.
  - PlasticTank 5y ago
    That seems like a strange line to draw, surely plenty of disabilities are genetic, implying bad genetics no?
    - Sholmesy 5y ago
      Sure, but it's unlikely that you would have an IQ that low, and not have a specific medical disorder that is causing some of your impairment. E.g, Down Syndrome is a chromosomal change, something that can be measured outside of a 'bad genetics'.
      - nullifidian 5y ago
        What? You somehow think that if there is a named thing then it's not genetics. It's genetics both if it's a named thing, and if it's yet unnamed thing too.
        Sholmesy 5y ago
        My point is that the distinction is important. Of course, named disorder or not, genetics can be the cause/have a high impact.
    - 5y ago
cm2187 5y ago
I couldn't agree more on an individual level. These difference in distribution though start to appear when you do statistics. And often an extreme percentile is used as a measure of whether there is discrimination (top engineer at google, board member at an international company, olympians). And it only takes minor differences in distributions (mean, standard deviation) to have big differences on such extreme percentiles.
notafraudster 5y ago
> 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. > Because it doesn't say anything about the individual people, who vary much more than the difference in averages. It's not clear it says anything about the difference in averages. Say someone is born in Syria with great genetic potential to be a distance runner, you might expect they are unlikely to "live up to that potential" because of all the obvious things that get in their way. Is it not possible that individuals who are biologically very well suited for distance running in Kenya have a better chance of ending up as distance runners than they do in America, because Kenya specializes in distance running and America does not, and because America actually specializes in other comparable things that are more remunerative? Or perhaps that in Kenya, amateur athleticism is a relatively lucrative career compared to outside options whereas in America it is not. Let me model this mathematically; say countries are homogeneous such that all persons born in the country j are characterized by a two parameter model that for the sake of argument we'll take to be normal: mean_j and sd_j. A draw from this distribution assigns natural talent theta_i to each person i. If they choose to train and run, we see theta_i, so the observed outcome is: y_i = D_i theta + (1 - D_i) 0. Thus training to run is a treatment (D_i); if you are treated you reveal your talent theta, if you are control, you don't run and no one knows. Then the characteristics of the population as a whole are characterized by mean, standard deviation, and n (population) and the observed distribution is just the distribution of y_i. In all countries D_i = f_j(theta_i, p_j); p_j refers to the fraction of the country that runs; in a country where everyone runs, the function is constant 1. In a country where runners are a random sample f_j has no theta_i term. You could imagine other functions that are positively or negatively correlated with talent. An easily implementation of this would be to draw a bernoulli variable with p_j and some correlation rho_j with theta_i; you can do this with a copula or the analytic formula for biserial normal-bernoulli correlation, but let's say the detals of the function are irrelevant. Finally, competition reveals max(y_i) for a country, and thus for the planet. It is easy to find a world where the identity of the winning country j is the country that has the highest mean. It's also possible that the identity reflects mean-sd-n (e.g. all countries have the same average but some have more variation; or more births = more outliers). But it's also easy to assign viable p_j or f_j(theta_i) p_j such that the "wrong" country wins because of cultural factors. It's true the model is a toy model (countries aren't homogeneous, talent may well not be normal, theta is not perfectly revealed and training has varying degrees of quality, individual race times have stochasticity), but even accepting the toy limitations wherein every cultural factor goes through f_j(theta_i) and p_j, it's clear we don't have a bead on mean_j. So, like, what now?
callmeal 5y ago
>Genetics has a huge influence on what someone is predisposed to and what they can achieve. That is not true. We've known that since the 80s. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-iii-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-budapestians/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-ii...
nickthemagicman 5y ago
The is a great point. Id like to add, society doesn't require geniuses to operate.
throwaway59553 5y ago
>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. It does matter in what regards intelligence because lots of professions require an IQ higher than the 85 or 90 needed for brick layers. You need that to have a stable and functioning highly developed society. Many criminals commit crimes, not because they're intrinsically "evil" but because they have very low impulse control, or difficulty in even understanding their victims feelings from the hurt they can cause them. You can circle around with irrelevant stuff such as if an European has the same probability of winning a marathon than a Kenyan, that will get you nowhere but maybe that's the plan. Fully understanding how intelligence works and how genetics influence it is paramount for any greater advance for Humanity. But that's rayciss I guess, as Mars won't have any base from the Somalia Space Association any time soon.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  I guess you'd be saying the same about the (extant) Congolese rocket program?

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.
- hnbad 5y ago
  Sure, there isn't a gene that makes you run faster, but no matter how hard you train, you'll have a hard time beating Michal Phelps unless you're also naturally built like Michael Phelps: https://www.biography.com/news/michael-phelp-perfect-body-swimming https://www.biography.com/news/michael-phelp-perfect-body-sw... The point isn't that there is a "best" set of genes. The point is that there can be genetic advantages or disadvantages. Physical reality has an impact on experiential reality. Where it gets dangerous is when people start using this as an argument for eugenics or an "ought" rather than "is" (i.e. constructing hierarchies out of physical attributes).
  - Noos 5y ago
    Yeah, considering the actual day to day life of all people, Michael Phelps's genetic advantages are pointless. They confer advantage only in a specifically designed field that society has created and that is really a tremendous waste of time all things considered; it's just a performance. But the aim of all this genetic stuff is not saying "well, Kenyans can make better marathon runners if we stick them into a sports contest." It's usually a lot more pernicious than that, and involves intelligence. And ordering society in some manner around genetic expressions in a way a lot more dangerous than recognizing some people are better at public performance than others.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    The US military routinely tests recruits for IQ and assigns roles appropriate to that level. They even outright reject some people for being too stupid. Nobody seems to be up in arms about it, why? We also already do all sorts of soft eugenics in our own lives, from assortative mating to academic scores and schools one attends, social circles that one enters because of their achievements and so on. At some point it will become a lot more quantitive, to reduce the currently large factor of luck. Societies that refuse to take advantage of optimizations this could bring will eventually lose out, for better or worse, this is entirely inevitable. The progress of technology is not always progressive. There is a reason most of sci-fi reads downright dystopian.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
armchairhacker 5y ago
True, but the talent isn't as obvious. Similarly, you could have two very slow runners give birth to a fast runner, and most of their speed would ultimately come down to getting the right recessive genes. Almost every trait, even willpower itself, is influenced by genetics. But for most traits it's very difficult if not impossible to reliably determine what genes influence what. Most things aren't determined by one gene, they're influenced by many genes, as well as randomness and your environment.

esyir 5y ago

The catch here would be thinking in distributions, and from that separating individuals from said distributions. A current topic would be representation within a given domain. Particularly since in most representation cases (high paying jobs, celebrities, top universities, etc), we're already looking at the tails of the distribution. There, small shifts can heavily affect the quantity of users in the right tail, especially for domains with stronger requirements (see your case with the runners). Of course I won't try to discount potential cultural impact, but anyone trying to sell you a story of how it's all nature or all nurture is typically spouting bullshit.

tsimionescu 5y ago
But it's a bad idea to compare the world's fastest runners with people getting high paying jobs - that's the main point of the GP's comment. Even for something as clearly and uncontroversially genetically influenced as running ability, the group differences only really matter for the top 100 people out of 7 billion. If you look at top 100k runners, the group differences are almost entirely gone. Even more, the top 100k runners are probably within a second or two of each other - entirely irrelevant if you were to hire based on a bar of performance, and not some elitist concept of hiring the very best possible.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Socially, who makes it to the top hundred matters a lot. We can know only so many people by name: Nobel awardees, composers like Bach and Dvořák. Our own brain capacity for knowledge makes us concentrate on the top 100s. While the 100k top scientists do matter scientifically, they do not matter culturally.
- marcusverus 5y ago
  > Even for something as clearly and uncontroversially genetically influenced as running ability, the group differences only really matter for the top 100 people out of 7 billion. Sure, but there is no social contention arising from racial differences in the world's fastest runners. What gets us in trouble are the the racial differences in high-prestige jobs. To really understand the impact of differences in distributions, you need to look at some numbers. The excerpt below comes from Douglas Murray's new book. I am not going to attempt to convince you that racial differences in IQ exist. But he makes a strong case that if such racial differences did exist, the impact on the distribution of high-prestige jobs would be absolutely enormous: "...Why are there so few minorities in these high-prestige jobs? It's a numbers game in which the odds are against a Latin (he uses geographic indicators in place of the colloquial 'black' and 'white', and 'latin' in place of 'hispanic') achieving one of those positions are high and the odds against an African are prohibitive, even if we assume that there is no racism whatsoever among the employers for high-prestige jobs. To illustrate, I'll use the cohort of young Americans ages 25-29, the age at which the potential candidates for such jobs are coming out of law schools, medical schools, business schools, and graduate STEM departments. In 2019, there were 23.2 million Americans in that age group. About 228,000 people in that age group can be expected to have IQs of 135 or over. The racial distribution of Americans ages 25-29 in 2019 was more multiracial than among the older population. Only 54% were European while 20 percent were Latin, 15 percent were African, and 6 percent were Asian. But that reduced dominance of Europeans in total population doesn't make a lot of difference in the 135+ pool. Employers seeking these exceptionally intelligent young adults were choosing from a pool that contained about 2,800 Africans [~1%] and 9,500 Latins [~3%] compared to 50,700 Asians [*~22%*] and 160,000 Europeans [~70%]." [~3% being 'other'] So, while the marginal IQ differences between individuals do not matter not one whit, when considered at the population level, these differences can hardly be ignored.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

dmingod666 5y ago
America in this case is a very bad country to measure with considering the amount of people that may actually be of very similar decent as your first examples..
- imbnwa 5y ago
  East Africa and West Africa aren't the same places

Tenoke 5y ago

Sure, that's a good point generally but doesn't seem at all the problem the article is addressing. Skimming it, it's about progressives denying group differences at all and calling those who research them 'equivalent to Holocaust Deniers'. From following genetics research and researchers, I've seen plenty of that, and I don't see the relevance of your point here.

simonh 5y ago
The research isn't specifically about group differences, or differences between populations anyway. That issue inevitably gets all the attention, but it's just one dimension. The vast majority of genetic differences between any two individuals have nothing to do with whatever arbitrary groups society categorises them with, and most genetic differences that do correlate with anything like race are basically cosmetic. Nevertheless genetic differences can make a huge difference to individuals. Many factors we uncontroversially categorise as disabilities have a genetic basis. In UK schools children categorised as on the Autism spectrum, or dyslexic receive additional support and consideration with regard to exam rules. I don't want to sideline into an argument about to what extent these specifically have a genetic basis, but broadly if we are going to agree that such factors are taken into account, it's flat out incoherent to then ignore or deny research into the origins, characteristics and influence of these factors.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  The backlash by progressives is usually specifically centered around the group differences part. And I don't buy that's the one that gets all the attention - all the negative one maybe, but most accepted and talked about genetic research isn't about that at all.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Different ethnic groups have meaningful difference in various allergies and disease risks, but that doesn’t get attention from the general public. That stuff is basically all interesting but largely meaningless because it’s so binary. It doesn’t matter if your part of a group that’s 10x as likely to be lactose intolerant, you are either lactose intolerant or your not. Sure the dairy industry might care, but the only impact on individuals is what they can bring to very large family gatherings. Even where it is actually meaningful to an ethnic group, people rarely from a single ethnic group. A large chunk of African Americans are whiter genetically than their black.

YetAnotherNick 5y ago

Genes describe lot of things from obese tendency to height to IQ to your looks. If someone has an IQ of 70, there are very likely to live a difficult life. Yes IQ is not intelligence you will say but still there is a limit to everyday functioning if someone's IQ is low. Ask a conventional ugly person(specially female) about their life.

Sholmesy 5y ago
I agree with you, but an IQ of 70 is mentally disabled, so it's not really a good example of "bad" genetics, so much as it is an example of a disability.
- PlasticTank 5y ago
  That seems like a strange line to draw, surely plenty of disabilities are genetic, implying bad genetics no?
  - Sholmesy 5y ago
    Sure, but it's unlikely that you would have an IQ that low, and not have a specific medical disorder that is causing some of your impairment. E.g, Down Syndrome is a chromosomal change, something that can be measured outside of a 'bad genetics'.
    - nullifidian 5y ago
      What? You somehow think that if there is a named thing then it's not genetics. It's genetics both if it's a named thing, and if it's yet unnamed thing too.
      - Sholmesy 5y ago
        My point is that the distinction is important. Of course, named disorder or not, genetics can be the cause/have a high impact.
  - 5y ago

cm2187 5y ago

I couldn't agree more on an individual level. These difference in distribution though start to appear when you do statistics. And often an extreme percentile is used as a measure of whether there is discrimination (top engineer at google, board member at an international company, olympians). And it only takes minor differences in distributions (mean, standard deviation) to have big differences on such extreme percentiles.

notafraudster 5y ago

> 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. > Because it doesn't say anything about the individual people, who vary much more than the difference in averages. It's not clear it says anything about the difference in averages. Say someone is born in Syria with great genetic potential to be a distance runner, you might expect they are unlikely to "live up to that potential" because of all the obvious things that get in their way. Is it not possible that individuals who are biologically very well suited for distance running in Kenya have a better chance of ending up as distance runners than they do in America, because Kenya specializes in distance running and America does not, and because America actually specializes in other comparable things that are more remunerative? Or perhaps that in Kenya, amateur athleticism is a relatively lucrative career compared to outside options whereas in America it is not. Let me model this mathematically; say countries are homogeneous such that all persons born in the country j are characterized by a two parameter model that for the sake of argument we'll take to be normal: mean_j and sd_j. A draw from this distribution assigns natural talent theta_i to each person i. If they choose to train and run, we see theta_i, so the observed outcome is: y_i = D_i theta + (1 - D_i) 0. Thus training to run is a treatment (D_i); if you are treated you reveal your talent theta, if you are control, you don't run and no one knows. Then the characteristics of the population as a whole are characterized by mean, standard deviation, and n (population) and the observed distribution is just the distribution of y_i. In all countries D_i = f_j(theta_i, p_j); p_j refers to the fraction of the country that runs; in a country where everyone runs, the function is constant 1. In a country where runners are a random sample f_j has no theta_i term. You could imagine other functions that are positively or negatively correlated with talent. An easily implementation of this would be to draw a bernoulli variable with p_j and some correlation rho_j with theta_i; you can do this with a copula or the analytic formula for biserial normal-bernoulli correlation, but let's say the detals of the function are irrelevant. Finally, competition reveals max(y_i) for a country, and thus for the planet. It is easy to find a world where the identity of the winning country j is the country that has the highest mean. It's also possible that the identity reflects mean-sd-n (e.g. all countries have the same average but some have more variation; or more births = more outliers). But it's also easy to assign viable p_j or f_j(theta_i) p_j such that the "wrong" country wins because of cultural factors. It's true the model is a toy model (countries aren't homogeneous, talent may well not be normal, theta is not perfectly revealed and training has varying degrees of quality, individual race times have stochasticity), but even accepting the toy limitations wherein every cultural factor goes through f_j(theta_i) and p_j, it's clear we don't have a bead on mean_j. So, like, what now?

callmeal 5y ago

>Genetics has a huge influence on what someone is predisposed to and what they can achieve. That is not true. We've known that since the 80s. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-iii-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-budapestians/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-ii...

nickthemagicman 5y ago

The is a great point. Id like to add, society doesn't require geniuses to operate.

throwaway59553 5y ago

>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. It does matter in what regards intelligence because lots of professions require an IQ higher than the 85 or 90 needed for brick layers. You need that to have a stable and functioning highly developed society. Many criminals commit crimes, not because they're intrinsically "evil" but because they have very low impulse control, or difficulty in even understanding their victims feelings from the hurt they can cause them. You can circle around with irrelevant stuff such as if an European has the same probability of winning a marathon than a Kenyan, that will get you nowhere but maybe that's the plan. Fully understanding how intelligence works and how genetics influence it is paramount for any greater advance for Humanity. But that's rayciss I guess, as Mars won't have any base from the Somalia Space Association any time soon.

selimthegrim 5y ago
I guess you'd be saying the same about the (extant) Congolese rocket program?