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> and you don't control your environment Surely you do control your environment, at least to some degree. E.g. when we were house-hunting, one of the factors t
by jfk13 4y ago
> and you don't control your environment
Surely you do control your environment, at least to some degree. E.g. when we were house-hunting, one of the factors that weighed pretty heavily was the environment (neighbourhood, schools, etc.) that we'd be putting our kids in by choosing a given home.
- spicyusername 4y agoRight, but the kinds of choices you are going to make are dictated by the kind of person you are. The kind of person you are is dictated by your genes are your past experiences. All those factors are out of your control. You were (are) only ever going to do the kinds of things you're going to do. So, in the context of parenting, stressing about what kind of parent you should be is meaningless. You're always only ever going to be the kind of parent you're going to be and your kids are only ever going to respond to that parenting in the way that they respond. Amusingly, this also means that parents who are going to stress about being the right kind of parent are always going to do that anyways.
- barrkel 4y agoThis denies the effect of exogenous information on choices, and conflates objective determinism with subjective free will. What if telling someone they had free will to make a choice affected the choices they deterministically made? What if saying something is out of your control changed what you did versus saying something is in your control? Even within the theory that things are "out of your control" due to some automatic mechanism, that mechanism is still triggered by exogenous information input.
- spicyusername 4y ago> This denies the effect of exogenous information on choices It doesn't though. Some parents, on reading one of these author's books on genetics, may alter the way they behave. Some parents may not. The way that either parent reacts to reading this "exogenous information" is dictated by their genes and lived experiences.
- jfk13 4y agoYou appear to hold a strongly mechanistic view of humanity (and perhaps of the world as a whole?). Not everyone shares that view. So if you're going to argue from that as a basis, you must expect we won't all share your conclusions. (But of course this is just my genes and experiences dictating my words...)
- spicyusername 4y ago> Originally proposed by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption, and promoted by popsci big shots like Matt Ridley and Stephen Pinker, the idea got another push from Robert Plomin in his 2018 book Blueprint. The latest proponent is economist Bryan Caplan on the 80,000 Hours podcast. Their argument is backed by heavyweight research, but simple at heart. I'm just outlining the arguments related to this discussion from most of those author's works. This podcast "Final Thoughts on Free Will" by Sam Harris presents some compelling arguments, if you're interested. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/241-final-thoughts-on-free-will https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/241...
- ImPostingOnHN 4y agoI think the fundamental flaw in the "we are who we are when we're born and can never change it so don't try" hypothesis, which posits this because "we can only do what our genes and lived experiences tell us to do", is that those genes and lived experiences give us the ability to change our programming, IE make a choice in changing how we behave, by adding new experiences of our choosing.