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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

#191

Post by froh »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #149
froh wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

what I meant was the top 1% is one in a hundred, and you personally know some people that are at that income and wealth percentile, don't you?

however for the 1 in 10_000 you may or may not know people in that tier and for the 1 in 100_000 let alone 1 in 1_000_000 you are close to that tier or part of it to personally know them (in such a way that they know you).

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

#192

Post by afpx »

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…

That page you link says that the poor that escape poverty do so by mingling with well-off people. The poor that stay poor only mingle with other poor people. The best route to becoming rich is to look and act like the rich and hang out where they hang out.

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

#193

Post by lazide »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #181
lazide wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone took action because of rational choice, they can make a different choice/action in the future. If someone is a ‘bad puppet’/fundamentally programmed badly, then what choice do we have except to destroy them or ‘rewrite’ their programming? That is the difference, and a big one - because in the first case, consent is possible and meaningful. The second one, it is not.

I think I agree with that, but I'm not sure how it relates to free will and criminal justice. Do you think that rationality is related or equivalent to free will??? I agree that someone's rationality may impact the efficacy of deterrence and Rehabilitation. Both irrational and the rational would need reprogramming, just by different means. You would try to convince a rational person that it's in their interest to obe…

I’d argue that if someone is not capable of making a rational decision (aka are driven entirely by emotional reactions), and/or impulsive (aka not able to control their emotional impulses), they’re essentially not able to freely make decisions in fact.

They’re being driven by things they have no choice in, and no way to meaningfully actually control.

When that is happening, they don’t actually have free will.

And this is where my original statement around ‘90% of the time free will is a necessary lie we tell ourselves’.

It’s why emotional manipulation (including advertising and propaganda) is so remarkably effective, and why it is so remarkably prevalent. It works - very well - 90% of the time.

And the reason this matters (philosophically), is because someone isn’t actually consenting (in the medical ethical sense [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent]) if they never had an option to actually make a choice - aka if they have no free will.

In the criminal justice system, that also comes into play with plea bargains, mens rea, sentencing, etc.

It also comes into play with sexual relations. And business. And things like gambling (which we generally excuse by saying ‘they are adults and can make their own decisions’ which presumes actual free will). Depending on who you ask, it comes into play with recreational drugs -or should never apply to recreational drugs.

If people don’t have free will, then all those excuses, rationalizations, justifications, freedom, etc. make no sense.

What actually makes sense in a no-actual-free-will scenario is a state-machine-like series of conditioning/programming responses to produce an expected society and/or individual. At least from a utilitarian perspective.

Which from a philosophical perspective is severely dystopian, if explicitly stated that way, as there is no freedom or actual choice - only fate.

But may legitimately produce more aggregate human happiness. Or more aggregate absolute human misery.

Depending on the goal of the state machine and the actual rules and application in practice.

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

#194

Post by elevatedastalt »

mjburgess wrote: post #188
elevatedastalt wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't. Here's it's not an individual that is being claimed to have heritability. It's their 'character', which is a trait, that is being claimed to be heritable. For eg. if you have dark skinned parents, you are likely to be dark skinned yourself. So 'skin color' is a trait that is being claimed to have heritability.

The point is that heritability is not inheritability. The former only tracks the latter in highly specific experimental circumstances that generally do not obtain. Of course a scottish accent isnt inheritable. The point is that the heritability statistic is near 100%. There is no statistics for inheritability. We have no idea, in general, what is inheritable and what isnt. It requires the kinds of experiments which a…

What's the diff between heritability and inheritability?

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

#195

Post by jokoon »

civilian wrote: post #8
jokoon wrote: post #2

Even when kids are put in school, they still spend a lot of time with their parents, and children do a lot of mimetic Would genetics lead to some personality disorder that are common in a family, and would that lead to similar personalities? Or would some brain-related genes lead to some forms of personality tendencies? I would also guess the definition of personality could be rejected by skeptics, since it's very di…

The personality metrics they're using are the Big-5. The Big 5 has good test-retest scores (if you take the test a month apart, you're likely to get the same scores). Big 5 is used in a ton of psychological studies now. If I had to bet on nature vs nurture, I'd place bets on nature. Separated twin studies seem to suggest genes are a strong determiner. And if you've ever met a kid who stubbornly prefers to be introver…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Cr... quite a lot of critics in there

I don't dismiss it entirely, and humans don't really know enough about how the brain works on the mechanical level. The big 5 doesn't look very insightful.

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

#196

Post by Enginerrrd »

whimsicalism wrote: post #104
Enginerrrd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 co…

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 cor…

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.

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

#197

Post by mjburgess »

elevatedastalt wrote: post #194
mjburgess wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that heritability is not inheritability. The former only tracks the latter in highly specific experimental circumstances that generally do not obtain. Of course a scottish accent isnt inheritable. The point is that the heritability statistic is near 100%. There is no statistics for inheritability. We have no idea, in general, what is inheritable and what isnt. It requires the kinds of experiments which a…

What's the diff between heritability and inheritability?

They are entirely different. That's my entire point.

Heritability doesnt mean inheritability. A trait is "heritable" only if it varies with the genes of some population, so a scottish accent is nearly 100% heritable.

Heritability was a statistic invented for when the experimenter was in control of what genes were in what population (for breeding plants). It is meaningless when genes arent being controlled.

Heritability is the idea that if you control which plant has which gene, and the plants are different, then it's probably because of the gene. But its applied to cases where no one is in control of the gene, so it's meaningless.

When I said scottish accents are nearly 100% heritable, that's correct, as a matter of fact. If you compute the heritability stat for scottish accents it'd be nearly 100%.

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

#198

Post by piloto_ciego »

whimsicalism wrote: post #67
piloto_ciego wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can…

I'm hardly screaming. I find the rhetoric when you start touching on things people don't like to be so odd. Suddenly I'm portrayed as having some sort of temper tantrum about heritability or limiting the next generation's capability or whatever. I think the next generation, like this one, will be fine. My whole point is that you can do things other than your upbringing.

I think this reply is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.
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