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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

#131

Post by s1artibartfast »

lazide wrote: post #117
s1artibartfast wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im saying that there is no difference, and most of the arguments around fee will and responsibility are distinctions without a difference. Individual choice happens if someone believes in an extra-physical soul or not. It happens if you believe in determinism or not. The question of if someone could have made a different choice is meaningless without an argument for why someone would make have a different choice.

All you're saying you don't (actually) believe in free will, philosophically. People who do believe in free will make an argument that regardless of the input state, the individual always has a choice what course they take, and is responsible for those decisions. So for example, if someone chooses to be a concentration camp guard or a capo vs be a prisoner and be murdered - that is their choice, and they are responsi…

>People who do believe in free will make an argument that regardless of the input state, the individual always has a choice what course they take, and is responsible for those decision

My point is that even with free will, you have to have some difference in input to get different output. Normally people invoke metaphysics, but even if you have a soul making the choice, it still has inputs (good soul/bad soul). It is a different object making the choice, but changes nothing about the choice itself.

I think the inside/outside of control argument is arbitrary with respect to responsibility. If you simply look at inputs and output actions, it doesnt matter what goes on the black box. It doesnt matter if it is biology, chemistry, or a soul, you still have a black box that takes inputs and executes an action.

A black box selects an action, no mater the mechanism. The black box is the causal link, independent of "control" or "not".

I'm not a philosophy expert, but this position reminds me consequentialism and Kantian ideas. I think it renders the different positions on free will/choice as distinctions without a difference. Doing something bad because you were programed to it is no better than doing something bad because you chose to.

It doesn't matter if the capos made a choice, were predetermined, or could have done different if they were raised by a loving mother instead.

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

#132

Post by elevatedastalt »

whimsicalism wrote: post #123
elevatedastalt wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will a kid born to Scottish parents who was separated at birth and raised by Chinese parents in China also speak in a Scottish accent? Or are you just giving insanely strawmannish arguments no one actually presents?

they’re making a (correct) point about causality and geographic gene variance

No, they are giving an absurd example in order to create the implication that heritability is a meaningless concept.

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

#133

Post by whimsicalism »

pavlov wrote: post #129
whimsicalism wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 'g…

If it’s such a taboo, why not just go to the essential point and state clearly what you’re talking about since this is an Internet forum. The coy “I’m not allowed to talk about this, ooh” act is tiresome.

I feel like I have… multiple times now across many different comments.

Stuff like hm, maybe the children of child abusers are likely to abuse children not only because they were raised that way but because of genetic behavioral factors. Or maybe the correlation between test scores and affluence doesn’t mean that test scores are bunk or only measure affluence, but are partially due to heritable confounders and the “affluence bias” isn’t as strong as we think.

The essential point is that there is strong evidence for genetic heritability of behavior.

But regardless, the point of my original comment was to discuss the interesting difference between academic/societal taboos and commonly held intuitions - not to enumerate all the possible taboo things related to this line of research.

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

#134

Post by standardUser »

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?

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.

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

#136

Post by Rinzler89 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #126
whimsicalism wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, real world socioeconomic data on familial wealth holdings is incredibly hard to come by.

Wealth is hard to come by, but income is much more available. Some countries have publicly available data on individual income filings. The US provides anonymized data, but scienentist have done a lot of fancy tricks to make the family connections clear. Raj Chetty among others have done a lot of work on US social mobility[1]. They were able to trend parent/child incomes in the US going back to 1940, and have tons of…

>Wealth is hard to come by, but income is much more available.

Income is a completely different thing than wealth and those two are not always directly correlated. You can have a good income but not accumulate much wealth because all is bein eaten away by taxes and a high CoL, and you can also have a low income but still decent wealth from an inheritance for example.

And the original claim was that wealth gets lost between generations by the majority of people which I find dubious.

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

#137

Post by extr »

crmd wrote: post #5

The big difference seems to come from self-reporting vs independent reporting. In other words, people around you think your personality is more similar to your dad’s than you think it is.

Something interesting to me is I have an 8 month old son. Everyone around me says he looks just like me. To me, he doesn't look like anyone in particular at all.

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

#138

Post by [deleted] »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #119
whimsicalism wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 structur…

No, it's not currently supported by evidence. It's an extremely specific example. But the needle has been moving more and more in that direction to the point where people should be comfortable with the idea that they have genetics to contend with not only when running and looking good, but also when thinking and behaving. Obviously the groups that will have the hardest time with accepting something like this are the…

[deleted]

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

#139

Post by mjburgess »

mucle6 wrote: post #124
mjburgess wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically for the area mentioned: https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/heritable/2015-burt.pdf But if you want a general criticism of these academic linear methods of observational analysis: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488

Didn't expect to see statistical consequences of fat tails! I bought that book and it was soooooo dense. I had trouble keeping up with it even after rereading it. Its basically a textbook

Read the chapter, "a non-technical overview - the darwin college lecture"

He's quite a bad communicator; that happened to be written by students attending his lecture.

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

#140

Post by kipchak »

lazide wrote: post #81
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is conjecture. Why are the people on the fence choosing the dark side? Why does a lack of free will preclude the possibility of any kind of consequences?

Regarding your first point - usually because the 'dark side' is easier (short term), and life periodically gets hard. So it's often inevitable. Especially in the face of others doing bad acts to you. Regarding the second - see my comment. At least in the western world, most crimes require fault and mens rea. Those require someone being able to make a informed choice, which means having free will. If there is (actuall…

Would removing the punitive aspect of punishment be enough to keep things making sense? For example with temporary insanity someone isn't considered deserving of retribution without real fault, but incapacitation and rehabilitation might still be justifiable if there was a risk of reoccurrence. Deterrence seems like it could also still be justifiable, for example if you thought someone could be aware of such a punishment while temporarily insane and less likely to commit murder as a result.

My understanding is the focus on punitive punishment has been higher than average since roughly the 1970s beginning with the war on drugs and is arguably not working very well measured in incarceration rates (US is #6th worldwide) so a shift seems away from culpability seems like it could potentially be a positive change. That being said like you say it's potentially it's own can of worms overcorrecting the other way.

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