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Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

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Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#581

Post by goatlover »

cloudfifty wrote: post #560
bart_spoon wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not an objective fact in the sense that there is nothing rigid in political and economic science like we have in mathematics or physics, but yes, every instance of attempts at building socialist governments have been tied at the waist to authoritarianism. In all cases, they have resulted in collapse (USSR), limped along under authoritarian rule (Cuba, Venezuela, Madagascar), or have thrived after jettisoning actu…

> every instance of attempts at building socialist governments have been tied at the waist to authoritarianism Hence the fierce insistence from large parts of the socialist movement throughout history that it must be radically democratic - otherwise oppression, rather than liberation will be the result.

The issue with being radically democratic is what to do with the portion of the population who doesn't want socialism? The communist parties thought they had to be authoritarian to force the transition. Or at least that was their justification.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#582

Post by Tenoke »

Retric wrote: post #483
Tenoke wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The backlash by progressives is usually specifically centered around the group differences part. And I don't buy that's the one that gets all the attention - all the negative one maybe, but most accepted and talked about genetic research isn't about that at all.

Different ethnic groups have meaningful difference in various allergies and disease risks, but that doesn’t get attention from the general public. That stuff is basically all interesting but largely meaningless because it’s so binary. It doesn’t matter if your part of a group that’s 10x as likely to be lactose intolerant, you are either lactose intolerant or your not. Sure the dairy industry might care, but the only…

For lactose intolerance maybe it doesn't matter. There are a lot of diesesases for which screening is not worth it if your risk is too low due to a high false negative compared to your risk (which is part of why we screen young people for a lot less).

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#583

Post by bart_spoon »

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…

> Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your aptitudes, and you've just dismissed them out of hand, apparently in favour of pre-determined genetic intelligence.

They didn't seem to do this at all. It can simultaneously be true that there are some who, due to genetics, simply cannot complete a particular task, no matter how conducive an environment they are put in, while for others genetically do not have these hurdles but whose success is still dependent on their environment.

If anything, you are the one dismissing this possibility out of hand, and making leaps of logic.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#584

Post by esyir »

Retric wrote: post #483
Tenoke wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The backlash by progressives is usually specifically centered around the group differences part. And I don't buy that's the one that gets all the attention - all the negative one maybe, but most accepted and talked about genetic research isn't about that at all.

Different ethnic groups have meaningful difference in various allergies and disease risks, but that doesn’t get attention from the general public. That stuff is basically all interesting but largely meaningless because it’s so binary. It doesn’t matter if your part of a group that’s 10x as likely to be lactose intolerant, you are either lactose intolerant or your not. Sure the dairy industry might care, but the only…

If you might remember a somewhat recent controversy when they tried to remove race in the eGFR (kidney effectiveness, sorta) calculations. This was not done for performance reasons, or to find a better measure. The impetus was the idea that it was racist, never mind the performance or benefit to black patients.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#585

Post by bjourne »

swebs wrote: post #505
tomp wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The research definitely is significant - definitely politically, if not scientifically (which I'd argue it is, any research that helps find the truth / predict the future / create a better model of the world is scientifically significant ). We're currently in the middle of several highly emotional political debates, which would easily be resolved by having better/more scientific data, particularly into the correlatio…

>which would easily be resolved by having better/more scientific data There's already quite a lot of data on the subject. Here's a 30 year meta-study from 2005 for example. https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense... The problem described in the article is that people are preventing/defunding further studies.

You know what both Rushton and Jensen were incredibly controversial figures, right? Perhaps not on the same level as Lynn and Vanhanen, but close.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#586

Post by dragonwriter »

zosima wrote: post #465
littlestymaar wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Murray was as far as can be determined acting in good faith. The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial, consistent with almost all scientific evidence and obvious.

> The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial

It is.

None of the controversy over the book is about that orbital-level view.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#587

Post by esyir »

croon wrote: post #440
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genes describe lot of things from obese tendency to height to IQ to your looks. If someone has an IQ of 70, there are very likely to live a difficult life. Yes IQ is not intelligence you will say but still there is a limit to everyday functioning if someone's IQ is low. Ask a conventional ugly person(specially female) about their life.

Obesity among US adults has gone from 10-15% in the 60s to 40% now. It's extremely unlikely that genetics changed in 60 years, but environmentals did. I understand that some have genetics that make it harder for them to keep off weight, either by metabolism, neural hunger stimuli or otherwise, but then we're still back to the fact that environmental changes made the biggest effect, not genetics. Why can't this be the…

I've always viewed genetics and talent as essentially your maximum potential. Lots of ways to drag you down from being all that you can be (lead, malnutrition, a good knock on the head), but given a sufficiently good environment, genetics (or perhaps inherent ability might be better) then become the limiting factor on how far you can go.

Your random guy on the street ain't going to be Newton, no matter how much he studies or loves math. Similarly, the man born with muscular dystrophy isn't going to be setting marathon records.

This is a simplification of course, but I hope it conveys the point.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#588

Post by michael1999 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #7
linksnapzz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some years ago, California tried to make it so that you had to pass Algebra II to graduate high school. I think the state backed down from that, because it meant only 25% of students could pass. Or maybe they just bowdlerized the definition of algebra II. It’s too bad, because I don’t think anyone should be able to leave high school without understanding compound interest-sorta vital for participating in a modern eco…

Do you really need to know Algebra II to understand exponential growth? Couldn't you just get by with multiplication and seeing a pattern and learning the FV function in excel?

The last 18 months of embarrassing COVID interventions show just how un-intuitive exponential growth is.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#589

Post by laverya »

midjji wrote: post #418

Genetics are discussed as social issue instead of as a missing practical technology, only because the tech isnt there yet. But it will be and soon, and once it is the left will embrace it like they did with prenatal vitamins. Embryo genediting and embryo selection works just fine, and the databases required to find polygene traits are beeing created, the techniques required beeing researched. Even today there are doz…

> But it will be and soon, and once it is the left will embrace it like they did with prenatal vitamins. Embryo genediting and embryo selection works just fine, and the databases required to find polygene traits are beeing created, the techniques required beeing researched.

https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection is a good overview of how practical this is today, IME. TL;DR: Selection is barely worth it at reasonable valuations of IQ points, but will be massively worth it in the future due to improvements in models and the ongoing reduction in price of polygenetic screenings. I believe this was last updated in 2016, though.

https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-editing for the babies of the "far future", or maybe 25 years from now.

Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

#590

Post by syops »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #152

In these comments: people doing apologetics for a vision of the world where everyone is born with equal potential. I am a scientist, I work on these things, and I am here to tell you that: --Intelligence is largely (~70-80% of variance) inherited --Your personality is largely determined by genetics and is pretty much settled in to what it will always be by ~30 --If you don't learn to count right by ~4 you never will…

Thanks for your rant! It was wells stated. I did not know anything of these things in the sense of having any academic knowledge about this stuff.

I didn't know about the counting one and am not surprised by this. In a thread on another post I wrote that there is a lot of brain washing that occurs in the teaching of low level mathematics. It's easier to brain wash children in this sense than it is for adults.

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