Live data from Hacker News

Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies

osf.io

71–80 of 198 posts

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

#71
post #46

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…

>It is estimated that 70% of wealthy families will lose their wealth by the second generation and 90% will lose it by the third.[0] [0] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...

That might have been truer when people were having 6+ children. With the modern average of 1.5, I doubt more than 10% lose their trust funds.

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

I understand your objection and of course you can't just naively get causality from observational GWAS. That is true.

Your rhetoric does not match the strength of your scientific objection. Let's imagine the worst case - these studies are absolutely useless for indicating any causality whatsoever. Even then, they are still extremely useful because they can explain away lots of environmental variation in a behavior of interest and increase the power of studies of human behavior. That's if they are purely non-causal and genetics actually has no impact whatsoever on behavior or the brain (a mechanistic stretch).

Sorry, but this simply does not match your rhetoric of 'pseudoscience' and closing entire fields down.

> 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.

I simply don't agree, but I can tell you won't be convinced on this point.

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

#73
post #46

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…

>It is estimated that 70% of wealthy families will lose their wealth by the second generation and 90% will lose it by the third.[0] [0] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...

What's the actual real world evidence on that? Plenty of rich European families have been rich for hundreds of years, and I'm not talking about royalty. That kind of disproves the theory.

The ones who go broke fast are usually the ones who also got rich fast, trough luck instead of work or knowledge, like from lottery wins or speculations.

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

#74
post #46

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…

>It is estimated that 70% of wealthy families will lose their wealth by the second generation and 90% will lose it by the third.[0] [0] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...

This isn't a real statistic, it's an advertisement for wealth management.

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

#75
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it nature vs nurture? If, so, how does your anecdote untangle that?

I think the taboo the poster was referring to was more along the lines of discussion of actual free will, level of control of self, etc. My take is that free will is, 90% of the time, a necessary lie. Because if we didn’t believe it, everything would get far far worse.

I think free will is simply a restatement of the fact the future is unknowable and the humans are agents.

You cant 100% predict what a person will do without duplicating the entire person and the world they are interacting with.

Even if everything is causally driven by historic circumstance, it is the human that synthesizes that history and computes an action

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

#76
post #62
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leas…

>We see some evidence in studies that wealthly grandparents are strong indicators of wealthly adult grandchildren. Seems just slightly obvious, though I'm sure the studies are more nuanced than this

Yeah, the ones I've seen have looked at things like even what type of assest the wealth is in (liquid, securities, land, etc). The type of wealth can be a factor in how well the wealth is remained.

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

#77
post #45

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?

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

[deleted]

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

#78

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 is simplified in the aphorism “you are the company you keep”.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't you allowed to discuss it?

[flagged]

I don't agree. This is only true if you think that people are deserving of a good life merely because they have a certain brain structure.

If you thought that in the first place, you weren't much of a leftist to begin with in my eyes.

e: Also - I want to be clear, variance is incredibly high even where there is heritable signal. The notion of X "can never be an astronaut because her genetically defined brain structure" and also her children is just not anywhere near supported by the evidence.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't you allowed to discuss it?

[flagged]

Which author presents those ideals? I think that runs counter to the "leftist" desire of equity over equality. I've never heard ex King say something to that regard. If anything it's a capitalist philosophy that "anyone can make it if they work hard enough", not a leftist one

Regardless "linchpin" is a bit much

Post reply on HN