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Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

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Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#51

Post by throwaway924385 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #47
pavlov wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s become a very tiresome rhetorical technique: “Listen to me yammer on vaguely but at length about a thing that I pretend I’m not allowed to talk about despite literally doing that right now” Whatever aura of mystery and suspense this may have once imbued is long gone by now.

"It's not taboo because people can discuss it anonymously on an internet forum" is not quite the compelling argument that you seem to think it is.

What do you want to discuss that you can't and where can't you discuss it?

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#52

Post by steve_adams_86 »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #36
whimsicalism wrote: post #17

It seems that this is a taboo topic to discuss oftentimes (especially academically), despite the fact that most people I meet seem to have an intuitive understanding that kids are often like parents. It also provides compelling alternate explanations for things like 'children of abusive parents are more likely to abuse' that you also are not really allowed to discuss nowadays.

Just look at the people who are convinced they have to beat up their kids to discipline them because "I turned out fine".

This is arguably a different mechanism. Propagation of personality seems to be based lest on acute, specific, traumatic events like physical abuse. We understand to some degree why hurt people hurt other people. It’s less clear why and how much we emulate our families in more subtle ways.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#53

Post by [deleted] »

darby_eight wrote: post #41
blackhawkC17 wrote: post #32

I feel this factor plays a huge role in rich/upper middle class/upper-class people staying rich or growing richer. Kids that grow up upper-class imitate their parent’s approach to work and life in general, giving them an upper-hand. Many poor kids are very smart and capable but end up imitating bad examples early on, making them handicapped. One of the best things a disadvantaged kid can get is a good role model. Doe…

This implies one's being upper class is a reflection of having better habits than the poor, which is incorrect. They just have more money. Rich people could not survive poverty.

[deleted]

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#54

Post by giantg2 »

darby_eight wrote: post #41
blackhawkC17 wrote: post #32

I feel this factor plays a huge role in rich/upper middle class/upper-class people staying rich or growing richer. Kids that grow up upper-class imitate their parent’s approach to work and life in general, giving them an upper-hand. Many poor kids are very smart and capable but end up imitating bad examples early on, making them handicapped. One of the best things a disadvantaged kid can get is a good role model. Doe…

This implies one's being upper class is a reflection of having better habits than the poor, which is incorrect. They just have more money. Rich people could not survive poverty.

Some of the richest people I've ever met have middle class or upper-middle class appearances. They do make good decisions, have good jobs, etc. We see some evidence in studies that wealthly grandparents are strong indicators of wealthly adult grandchildren. We also know that poor habits deplete wealth quickly (like with lotto winners). It seems reasonable at least some wealthy people have good habits and that at least some of the children adopt those habits and manage to at least protect the existing wealth.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#55

Post by mjburgess »

whimsicalism wrote: post #31
mjburgess wrote: post #19

For those who arent aware, this entire field is largely pseudoscience; though this paper goes out of its way to be fairly sincere in its modelling, it's still just nonesense methodologically. The correlation coefficient is not a measure of correlation, but of co-linearity, and coefficients the entire system of computing correlation coefficients is bunk if the data is nonlinear. Almost all interesting phenomena outsid…

You're clearly arguing from the conclusions you want to be true. Nobody who is in the know and actually is skeptical of this branch of work (ie. people like Sasha Gusev) thinks it is as useless as you are making it out to be. Adoption studies produce causality and even the GWAS (genome-wide association studies) stuff, while not necessarily causal, is pretty interesting.

I'm presenting using heritability as an initial toy problem area for exploring building PPL/agent-based scenario models. I havent yet got to the point of building the model out, but it's clear very early on that any observational distribution can be reproduced. I will have a more refined view when I've done that.

re Sasha Gusev: disease, to some degree, can be studied with these methods if you have interventional evidence of a genetic cause.

But since all non-genetic factors are almost obviously mutually interacting, with "compound interest", no explanatory model can be fit.

eg., suppose your personality is entirely genetic: then why variation? Well, because of gene-environment interactions.

eg., suppose your personality is 0% genetic: when why genetic co-variation? Because people's genes covary geographically, and due to the trait selection of partners... ie., families live in the same geography, and people of similar traits breed together.

Why (very weak) correlation with genetic similarity? Because "compound interest" applies to the interacting factors, so even extremely weak geographical selection will compound.

It is entirely unclear to me how you're meant to discriminate between teh infinite family of models on either side.

Certainly, with correlation coefficients of ~.2, you're talking about pseudoscience either way. The causes would have to be extremely linear for such trivial correlations to mean anything at all, and they certainly arent.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#56

Post by Enginerrrd »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #29

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?

>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.)

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#57

Post by piloto_ciego »

whimsicalism wrote: post #38
throwaway924385 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't you allowed to discuss it?

The suggestion that personality or really any sort of brain function is linked to genetics at all seems to fly in the face of mind-body dualism and Hollywood-movie-ethics ("anyone can do anything if they work hard enough") both of which are things most people seem to hold very dearly.

People can do a lot more than we give them credit for. Humans are fucking tough, creative, and persevering if you teach them to be. I worry that the people screaming the loudest about how we have no free will or no ability to even make choices because of physics and neuroscience are handicapping the next generation with a sort of learned helplessness.

It is true that there are serious limitations on what I can or cannot do, but taking action and choosing to cast off the traits of parents that you don’t like or think aren’t productive is possible. You can change and go beyond your upbringing.

You are a product of it, but you can decide to be different, I’m living proof. It’s just hard.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#58

Post by whimsicalism »

throwaway924385 wrote: post #51
whimsicalism wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's not taboo because people can discuss it anonymously on an internet forum" is not quite the compelling argument that you seem to think it is.

What do you want to discuss that you can't and where can't you discuss it?

> where can't you discuss it?

Publicly, in academia, generally anywhere?

> What do you want to discuss

The topic at hand? The 'cycles of abuse' thing I mentioned earlier? GWAS with behavioral predictions and their usage in increasing the power of non-genetic behavioral studies? All sorts of things about genetic basis for behavior?

Even the way I'm getting responded to here indicates that people are searching for a 'gotcha' - it would be much worse in actual academia.

I don't really understand the motivation for denying this taboo exists.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#59

Post by anovikov »

blackhawkC17 wrote: post #32

I feel this factor plays a huge role in rich/upper middle class/upper-class people staying rich or growing richer. Kids that grow up upper-class imitate their parent’s approach to work and life in general, giving them an upper-hand. Many poor kids are very smart and capable but end up imitating bad examples early on, making them handicapped. One of the best things a disadvantaged kid can get is a good role model. Doe…

I'd say having a "stable middle-class" parent is the worst starting point to become rich. It's a sure way to become a similarly boring middle-middle class person - that is, a strictly conformist, risk-averse, boot-licking serf.

Kid of a rich person will probably become rich because they inherit cash. Kid of a poor person may become rich because they are ready to take risk and usually have good social skills. That, or they may die trying or end up in prison... But there's no good pathway to become rich if you come from a boring middle-middle-class. Too little money for elite uni or other ways to "hack" it, too little money for risk taking ("starting a startup because you always have something to fall back on"), and inherited attitude against risk-taking. Dead end. You just take up a mediocre white collar job and count years till retirement.

Re: Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

#60

Post by s1artibartfast »

darby_eight wrote: post #41
blackhawkC17 wrote: post #32

I feel this factor plays a huge role in rich/upper middle class/upper-class people staying rich or growing richer. Kids that grow up upper-class imitate their parent’s approach to work and life in general, giving them an upper-hand. Many poor kids are very smart and capable but end up imitating bad examples early on, making them handicapped. One of the best things a disadvantaged kid can get is a good role model. Doe…

This implies one's being upper class is a reflection of having better habits than the poor, which is incorrect. They just have more money. Rich people could not survive poverty.

I largely disagree due to social mobility.

If you look at the differences between people who escape poverty and those that don't, you will find major differences in Habits and capability.

If you look at people who drop in social class and those that dont, you will also find differences.

If starting wealth was all that mattered, and human behavior had zero impact, you would see no mobility. I guess one could chalk mobility up to random luck, but this flies in a the face off massive amounts of data correlating performance with outcome.

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