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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

#141

Post by mjburgess »

elevatedastalt wrote: post #132
whimsicalism wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heritability is a population statistic, individuals dont have "heritability". So it doesnt apply to any "kid" anywhere.

It's a practically useless concept outside of extremely narrow fields of biology, where you can control causes or otherwise eliminate genetic variation.

In the vast majority of cases where people use 'heritability', it is useless. Knowing how much a trait varies, or fails to vary, with genes tells you nothing about whether its inherited.

Under stable genetic equilibrium near universally inherited traits will have a heritability of zero; and under cultural, social, geographical etc. selection of mates, 0% inherited traits will be arbitrarily close to 100% heritability.

It's a statistics designed for cases where the experimenter is actually controlling the genetic variance (ie., breeding plants) across populations; it's otherwise meaningless.

Consider a security guard who forces all past shoplifters to wear a tag. Under such an induced causal relationship, wearing a red tag becomes predictive of future criminal behaviour. Otherwise, it's useless.

Likewise, when an experimenter is inducing genetic varience, then it becomes explanatory and predictive; otherwise, it's useless.

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

#142

Post by eastbound »

apwell23 wrote: post #128
alistairSH wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I grow older, the number of "oh shit, I sound like my dad" moments grows exponentially. Good thing people seem to like him - if he was a gigantic ass, I'd be in trouble. ;)

My dad has an habit of making an innocent remark that other party percives as offensive. He blurts out things in his enthusiasm. I used to feel second hand embarssement from it when i was younger. Now i see catch myself doing the same thing. I even got into trouble at work for it.

I have this. I don’t notice it. People must think I’m really socially stupid. I try to say things that I think are commonly-shared. Then, in every group, out of nowhere (it’s only months later that I remember what may have triggered it), I’m expelled (generally for another reason, because it would be too simple if people said “I don’t like you because…”).

I’m 40 and since 4 years, my solution is to recluse myself and meet as few people as I can, with people who get over my defect.

I must be able to do something about it, but it requires tremendous effort. Basically I have to try to remain silent and innocuous as much as I can, and guess people. It’s hell.

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

#143

Post by heyjamesknight »

trallnag wrote: post #130

Isn't this obvious? It is very obvious to me

The reproducibility crisis and general decay of academia has given us a few decades of bad science. Entire fields have been built using massaged statistics to deny common sense in the pursuit of tenure.

We're just now "unlearning" much of this, especially in the social sciences.

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

#144

Post by s1artibartfast »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #136
s1artibartfast wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I think that as a practical matter, they are extremely correlated. Wealth sitting in cash loses half its value every 20 years. Physical assets require upkeep and property taxes.

In practice, if you aren't making income, you losing wealth.

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

#145

Post by froh »

whimsicalism wrote: post #72
mjburgess wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> Your rhetoric does not match the strength of your scientific objection.

thank you for this way of putting it. made my day.

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

#146

Post by s1artibartfast »

pineaux wrote: post #114
s1artibartfast wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the free will debate is not about this. Its more about the question if the mind is part of a deterministic universe, thus being deterministic itself. I dont believe this myself. The universe is quasi deterministic. I would say it's emergent. So there are constantly "random" things that are building on top of the n-1 condition. This random things can be an electron that moves left instead of right. Or it allow…

I guess my argument and problem is with the idea of a non-deterministic mind. I think it is a non-sensical concept. Even if the mind is free from physical world constraints, it is still subject to it's own nature. If the mind is self direction, the nature of the mind or soul determines its choice.

I dont see how this changes the question of free will from a personal or moral responsibility perspective.

Someone can ascribe no responsibility because actions are just the product of your physical inputs. Similarly, you can ascribe no responsibility because that is how someone's soul is made.

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

#147

Post by froh »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #88
Rinzler89 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a lot of real world socioeconomic data on it. studies usually look at the population in terms of 20 or 25% segments. That doesn't mean it is true for the 1% or 0.1%. That said, there are lots of examples of people entering and leaving the top 1% too, so outcome isn't perfectly deterministic.

the top 1% is people we all know.

the interesting groups are the top .1% and .01%. there isn't that much fluctuation at that layer.

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

#148

Post by Rinzler89 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #144
Rinzler89 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 b…

I think that as a practical matter, they are extremely correlated. Wealth sitting in cash loses half its value every 20 years. Physical assets require upkeep and property taxes. In practice, if you aren't making income, you losing wealth.

>Wealth sitting in cash loses half its value every 20 years.

By wealth, people tend to mean assets, not petty cash sitting in checking accounts. If you're sitting on inherited assets you're accumulating more wealth by just sitting on your ass without doing anything.

Just see the post-2009 monetary polices: from housing to stocks, everything went up like crazy, especially during COvid. You didn't have to be financially literate, all you had to do was sit on your inherited assets and not touch them and the government's money printer did the work for you in the last 10+ years.

So forgive me but I still see no proof that 72% people loose their wealth between generations, when everything went up up up in the last decades, especially housing. Unless that wealth we're talking about was an old carpet and $600 bucks in a checking account.

>Physical assets require upkeep and property taxes.

N'ah bruh. Stocks or empty land in desirable areas requires no upkeep and wealth taxes in some EU countries range from laughable to zero, while income taxes in those same countries hover around 50%. Go ahead, tell me more how income is the same thing with wealth.

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

#149

Post by s1artibartfast »

froh wrote: post #147
s1artibartfast wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of real world socioeconomic data on it. studies usually look at the population in terms of 20 or 25% segments. That doesn't mean it is true for the 1% or 0.1%. That said, there are lots of examples of people entering and leaving the top 1% too, so outcome isn't perfectly deterministic.

the top 1% is people we all know. the interesting groups are the top .1% and .01%. there isn't that much fluctuation at that layer.

You said we don't know but claim to know. Which is it?

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

#150

Post by dleink »

whimsicalism wrote: post #133
pavlov wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “af…

If "children of child abusers are more likely to abuse children" were to be found undeniably true, how should we use this knowledge? Are you proposing some kind of public policy?
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