Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#421

Post by yodsanklai » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 11:08 AM UTC

> The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.

Try to have a nuanced view on covid mitigation strategies and you'll feel the same way. Even on HN which encourages rationality.

There are lot of very polarized topics where it's pretty much impossible to have a rationale conversation. I have the feeling pretty much everybody choose what they want to believe and then build a rationalization to justify their views. Pretty depressing.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#422

Post by syops » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 11:08 AM UTC

DanHulton wrote: post #128

syops wrote: post #2

From the article: Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes. The fact that this area is controversial suggests to me that it is worth exploration. I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely con…

You're making a lot of leaps of logic here, which might be why your colleagues are disagreeing with you. You go from "not everyone can learn algebra or calculus" and "mental disabilities exist" to "therefore intelligence is a scale and controlled by genetics and unalterable," which doesn't really track. Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your apt…

There were no leaps of logic made by me. I never indicated or said anything about genetics. I said that it’s clear some people can’t learn algebra and gave an extreme example of such a person by saying that an intellectually disabled person can’t learn algebra. I then said that I’m convinced that there is some level of “intelligence” required to learn algebra.

I said absolutely nothing about what percent of people this is true for and absolutely nothing about why this is true. I brought it up in the context of the article because saying that not everyone can learn algebra is as taboo in education as the thought that genetics plays a role in poverty and success in life in psychology. My reason for thinking this is responses like yours.

There are clearly people who can’t learn algebra: intellectually disable people are such an example. I believe some level of “intelligence” is require to learn algebra.

How can you conclude from what I’ve written that I haven’t thought much about my belief? How can it appear I have an axe to grind from what I’ve written? You have formed an image of me that is wildly incorrect. Do you initially assume that everyone who thinks not everyone can learn algebra has an axe to grind?

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#423

Post by concordDance » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 11:11 AM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #179

lamontcg wrote: post #115

I don't particularly have a problem accepting that intelligence could be genetic. But then people use that to argue that the people at the top deserve everything they have. The exact same argument was made back when we had slavery. Now its just used to justify wage slavery and gross wealth inequality and policies which punish the poor. (It also is grossly oversimplified and discounts reversion to the mean and that tw…

The main problem with tying specific skills to genetics is that it's not yet possible. We can't even figure out how to get a car to drive itself reliably, and we build the car from scratch. We are not even slightly close to figuring out how genes correlate to advanced complex behaviors that involve learned elements. There are endless factors and interplay between them that determine an already vague concept such as "…

The thing is, you don't need to know in detail how a car works to see that car A is faster than car B or that that self-driving car crashes less than that other one.

Similarly, you can tell how much of intelligence is genetic for a given environment (and the "for a given environment" bit is forgotten by so many) by comparing clones (identical twins) to non-clones (non-identical twins).

Additionally, sometimes even if you don't understand about how anything happens you can still influence the result. E.g. you don't need to know anything about protein expression and brain development to breed more docile foxes. (Not that I would recommend trying breeding experiments on humans)

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#424

Post by antocv » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 11:17 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #133

syops wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is theorized to be impossible is learning a language as an adult if you did not learn a language as a child. That is, if at age 20 you know 0 languages then you’ll never be able really learn a language. For obvious reasons experiments in this regard are few. My conclusion is that some people simply can’t learn algebra. Be it genetic, environmental, lack of intellectual fortitude, lack of “intelligence”, or any c…

Environmental covers a lot. A mal-nourished homeless person probably cannot learn algebra - they would have much more immediate concerns to deal with. However that feels really different from saying a not insignificant portion of the population, inherently cannot.

Yes everybody can learn to code and get rich if they just put their will into it.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#425

Post by concordDance » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 11:18 AM UTC

littlestymaar wrote: post #416

cm2187 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the argument Chomsky makes about the fact that this research would have no purpose in a society that treats people as individuals, ie not a racist society, is certainly valid, but the current progressivism is to do the opposite, ie to define people by their race/sex, and to count the number of people of each race or sex in organisations, and to call racism/sexism if it is not exactly the population distri…

> i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it. This sentence makes it sound as if Murray was acting in good faith when writing the Bell Curve and received undue flack from susceptible people. This wasn't what happened: Murray and Herrnstein used a big corpus of explicitly racist studies (pro-apartheid South A…

Any non video critiques avilable? Videos are much harder to analyze, assess and think about.

As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#426

Post by syops » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 11:19 AM UTC

Hermitian909 wrote: post #154

DanHulton wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a lot of leaps of logic here, which might be why your colleagues are disagreeing with you. You go from "not everyone can learn algebra or calculus" and "mental disabilities exist" to "therefore intelligence is a scale and controlled by genetics and unalterable," which doesn't really track. Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your apt…

I think the more people can learn algebra than OP implies, but as a former math educator my experience also indicates some people are genetically limited in mathematics. For reference, my specialty was working with very remedial students and only ever had a few students not make progress (~2%) but I do think that small percent was genuinely hopeless and I don't say that lightly. I have a pet theory as to why those st…

I didn’t imply anything about the number of people who can’t learn algebra other than that I think the number of such people exceeds the number of intellectually disabled people. I used the word intelligence and put this in quotes because intelligence is not really definable but the word does convey a sense of what I mean. One must have a certain level of cognitive ability to learn something. Where that level is for a given topic I can’t say.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#427

Post by syops » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 11:23 AM UTC

LukaCEnzo wrote: post #299

DanHulton wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a lot of leaps of logic here, which might be why your colleagues are disagreeing with you. You go from "not everyone can learn algebra or calculus" and "mental disabilities exist" to "therefore intelligence is a scale and controlled by genetics and unalterable," which doesn't really track. Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your apt…

Other traits like height, health, beauty vary and are influenced by genetics. Intelligence varies between species, and is therefore, at least in part determined by genetics. Presuming that there are only mentally disabled and normal people is the weird hypothesis. The baseline idea should be that it varies just like health and height. Affected by both genetics and outside factors such as malnutrition and injuries.

This is very nicely put. I wish I had thought of this phrasing when I posted my original comment. The point of my comment was to mention that there are heretical ideas that people won’t discuss in other areas of intellectual inquiry. That was the relation of my comment to the article.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#428

Post by midjji » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 11:27 AM UTC

blast wrote: post #293

Chomsky wrote the definitive progressive answer to all this 50 years ago: https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20block... Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve. Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the…

His arguments regarding the social consequences arent as good as they could be, but the ideas he is refuting are so stupid that I cant tell if they are strawmen or just commonly held ideas. Chomskys writing is often convincing, but his perspective always seems so limited. The (in)significance of the research, intentionally vague regarding specific or general as a trick, and justified by fear of missuse in politics, perhaps. But it shows an emphasis on argument over substance, and a lack of perspective on technology.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#429

Post by concordDance » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 11:30 AM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #329

blast wrote: post #293

Chomsky wrote the definitive progressive answer to all this 50 years ago: https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20block... Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve. Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the…

> assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research, even if it is true - a phrase he uses a lot. Absolutely true. Even if it's true, the society should not give ammunition to closet racists with their attempts to stealthily legitimise racism. Equally so, in the current immigration debacle, we need to call things their own names. What these p…

These assumptions of sinister motives are unwarranted.

There are a small minority of people who find distortions of the truth aesthetically displeasing and finding things out pleasing, these people often become scientists. (I'm not one of them really, I get off on feelings of smug superiority I get by disagreeing with the "ignorant masses")

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#430

Post by concordDance » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 11:33 AM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #353

concordDance wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many orders of magnitude more effort has been spent on the latter to little avail.

I disagree - we have excellent tooling avaliable to cram and compile code into smallest CPUs, but our teaching methods are still the same as they were in 1800's

I think this reveals a lot of ignorance on the huge amounts of different teaching methodologies and techniques that have risen and fallen over the last 100 years.