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Some of the comments here are quite baffling for me to read. Of course I'm like my parents. I'm completely made up of their genetic material and for my formati

by throwaway22032 2y ago

Some of the comments here are quite baffling for me to read. Of course I'm like my parents. I'm completely made up of their genetic material and for my formative years I spent almost all of my time with them. I've never considered this to be taboo either, it's bloody obvious. Is there some sort of hidden context here I'm not getting?

Aeolun 2y ago
I think maybe they’re talking about kids that hated every minute of their life while living with their parents, only to do the same thing after. Even if you’ve lived like that all the time, if you hated it, you’d expect someone to do the opposite.
Xirgil 2y ago
You really don't understand why nature/genetics having a large impact on people's personality, thus behavior, and thus life outcomes is taboo?
- djeastm 2y ago
  They're just saying it seems obvious that a person would be like their parents. Nothing more grandiose than that.
  - Xirgil 2y ago
    And in doing so they mention genetics.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Enginerrrd 2y ago
>I've never considered this to be taboo either, it's bloody obvious. Is there some sort of hidden context here I'm not getting? There is. So the problem comes in when you start looking at something like say a particular minority racial/ethnic group and then picking some statistic that is higher or lower than the average over all people and associating that statistic with bad outcomes like violent offenses, lack of conscientousness/underachievement, etc. So for example, if you're saying that violent offenses can be attributed to heritable personality traits (rather than environmental/circumstantial) in those groups of people, you're basically right back to the old and not-so-old eugenic and racist arguments about human behavior. It's likely that there is some effect there, but the question is to what extent is that useful information in terms of education/discussion or setting policy goals and stuff. Also, there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot. (It's not hard to imagine that the same personality trait that tends to produce aggression could manifest VERY differently for someone raised in an environment where physical violence was common and necessary to survive, vs someone upper middle class, or someone in the CEO private-school class of people.)
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  Speak for yourself. I was the one who made the original taboo comment and you are simply putting tons of words in my mouth. There are much simpler, much more solid mechanistically scientifically associations that are still taboo to discuss that imo have nothing to do with race (race isn't even a real thing). For instance, a common argument I hear is that "standardized tests are just testing affluence" because the correlation between parental income and standardized test performance is so high. It seems pretty obvious to me that there are potential heritable confounders there, but I would never feel comfortable discussing this publicly. It's also frustrating because people will strongly implicitly weight the evidence by what they want to be true. Anything contrary to what they want to be true gets much stricter scrutiny than the reverse. For instance, "there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot" is simply not an accurate statement of the science. Measurable environmental factors don't explain even remotely close to everything. A lot (or all of the remaining) could just be random variance, but the idea that there just isn't much variance left to explain otherwise is absurdly wrong but people want it to be true.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Enginerrrd 2y ago
    Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't intend to say that's what you were saying at all. My hypothetical used the words "you're" and that's just a bad habit of mine, it was not intended to indicate that I thought that you thought that way. I understood what you were saying, and I had no intention of attributing such ill-will to you. I was only trying to explain the logical chain that can lead to the original observation/opinion to be considered a taboo one. For what it's worth, I'm totally on your side, but I was only trying to illustrate the problems with going down that line of thinking, and why some consider it taboo. There are some deep problems in the social sciences right now. The fact that some feel reluctant to discuss things they believe to be true is a bad thing in my opinion because it eliminates the opportunity for counter-arguments to be made and considered. I also think that the arguments on how standardized tests merely test affluence are terrible, and sometimes I feel that actually these arguments are surreptitious ways of ensuring that affluent kids get to still go to school, even if they wouldn't quite do well enough on the exams. The idea that SAT training is a profound effect is a bad one. Studying and prep will improve scores, but not by as much as people seem to think.
fbfifjjebdidndb 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
standardUser 2y ago
There is a common right-wing strawman argument that pretends people/liberals are unwilling to discuss the impact of genetics on human behavior because of potentially uncomfortable conclusions that may be drawn about race, gender or other inborn traits. That's clearly fueling some of the comments you're referring to. That ecosystem of thought tends to be so insular that people from within it can sounds incoherent to people outside of it.

Aeolun 2y ago

I think maybe they’re talking about kids that hated every minute of their life while living with their parents, only to do the same thing after. Even if you’ve lived like that all the time, if you hated it, you’d expect someone to do the opposite.

Xirgil 2y ago

You really don't understand why nature/genetics having a large impact on people's personality, thus behavior, and thus life outcomes is taboo?

djeastm 2y ago
They're just saying it seems obvious that a person would be like their parents. Nothing more grandiose than that.
- Xirgil 2y ago
  And in doing so they mention genetics.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Enginerrrd 2y ago

>I've never considered this to be taboo either, it's bloody obvious. Is there some sort of hidden context here I'm not getting? There is. So the problem comes in when you start looking at something like say a particular minority racial/ethnic group and then picking some statistic that is higher or lower than the average over all people and associating that statistic with bad outcomes like violent offenses, lack of conscientousness/underachievement, etc. So for example, if you're saying that violent offenses can be attributed to heritable personality traits (rather than environmental/circumstantial) in those groups of people, you're basically right back to the old and not-so-old eugenic and racist arguments about human behavior. It's likely that there is some effect there, but the question is to what extent is that useful information in terms of education/discussion or setting policy goals and stuff. Also, there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot. (It's not hard to imagine that the same personality trait that tends to produce aggression could manifest VERY differently for someone raised in an environment where physical violence was common and necessary to survive, vs someone upper middle class, or someone in the CEO private-school class of people.)

whimsicalism 2y ago
Speak for yourself. I was the one who made the original taboo comment and you are simply putting tons of words in my mouth. There are much simpler, much more solid mechanistically scientifically associations that are still taboo to discuss that imo have nothing to do with race (race isn't even a real thing). For instance, a common argument I hear is that "standardized tests are just testing affluence" because the correlation between parental income and standardized test performance is so high. It seems pretty obvious to me that there are potential heritable confounders there, but I would never feel comfortable discussing this publicly. It's also frustrating because people will strongly implicitly weight the evidence by what they want to be true. Anything contrary to what they want to be true gets much stricter scrutiny than the reverse. For instance, "there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot" is simply not an accurate statement of the science. Measurable environmental factors don't explain even remotely close to everything. A lot (or all of the remaining) could just be random variance, but the idea that there just isn't much variance left to explain otherwise is absurdly wrong but people want it to be true.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Enginerrrd 2y ago
  Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't intend to say that's what you were saying at all. My hypothetical used the words "you're" and that's just a bad habit of mine, it was not intended to indicate that I thought that you thought that way. I understood what you were saying, and I had no intention of attributing such ill-will to you. I was only trying to explain the logical chain that can lead to the original observation/opinion to be considered a taboo one. For what it's worth, I'm totally on your side, but I was only trying to illustrate the problems with going down that line of thinking, and why some consider it taboo. There are some deep problems in the social sciences right now. The fact that some feel reluctant to discuss things they believe to be true is a bad thing in my opinion because it eliminates the opportunity for counter-arguments to be made and considered. I also think that the arguments on how standardized tests merely test affluence are terrible, and sometimes I feel that actually these arguments are surreptitious ways of ensuring that affluent kids get to still go to school, even if they wouldn't quite do well enough on the exams. The idea that SAT training is a profound effect is a bad one. Studying and prep will improve scores, but not by as much as people seem to think.

fbfifjjebdidndb 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

standardUser 2y ago

There is a common right-wing strawman argument that pretends people/liberals are unwilling to discuss the impact of genetics on human behavior because of potentially uncomfortable conclusions that may be drawn about race, gender or other inborn traits. That's clearly fueling some of the comments you're referring to. That ecosystem of thought tends to be so insular that people from within it can sounds incoherent to people outside of it.