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.
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.
I think mainstream culture used to be more tolerant of people saying unintentionally hurtful things. And that cultural change puts at an disadvantage individuals who have higher autistic traits, impulsivity, etc. Whereas, people at the opposite end of the personality trait spectrum aren’t disadvantaged by it to anywhere near the same degree
same here. once i had children i recognized some of the behavior traits of how my dad treated me and my siblings. the difficult ones are the ones done unconsciously. i didn't recognize some until i saw my own kids repeating them. my wife also at one point recognized behaviors she learned from her parents. this recognition helped us both to better understand each other and accept our respective quirks.
We tend to define ourselves by our differences and I think this is especially true when it comes to close contacts - our family is the large comparator so often times you might hear "Well, I'm more short tempered than my father" from an incredibly calm person - and that contrast that they've observed may be quite correct from their perspective but measured against others it is a relatively less significant difference.
I agree. I've noticed that people tend to think they are average in comparison to someone else in their family with a slightly stronger expression of a trait. "You think I'm frugal! You should meet my mother! She always ..."
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.
A few weeks ago, I noticed a personality "quirk" in my 14 yr old daughter that had disappeared in my own teens. I've never told my wife, no one else has told her (not alot of my family left to tell it, they might not even have been aware). It's specific, non-subjective. It seems almost impossible that it should be genetic (but I have no other idea how it might heritably transmit).
The idea that personality is heritable is, to me, not farfetched at all.
My son is 11, I'll get to see if he does the same within a few years.
Not trying to be an edgy contrarian, but my dad was never around and I turned out very different as a result. My mother also worked a lot, so completely checked out and a neglectful enabler. I despised a lot about both my parents. When I would introduce them it tended to hurt my relationships unless they too had crappy parents, so I stopped doing that. I spent most of my childhood and early adult life with other people's families.
The far more interesting study to me is how much genetics can be overcome due to harsh circumstances.
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 difficult to define how we perceive or measure personality traits. It's scientific, but many would have no problem undermining some aspects of those definitions.
There have been studies against twins, separated at birth, that suggest there is a significant genetic component to personality [1]. To me, this seems obvious.
> Would genetics lead to some personality disorder that are common in a family, and would that lead to similar personalities?
To some extent, yes. "Personality disorders" are caused by a combination of genetic predispositions and behavior. For instance, someone with a high level of sensitivity might learn from their parents and the environment to become anxious.
> I would also guess the definition of personality could be rejected by skeptics
The thing to understand about psychology is that all the lines are arbitrarily drawn, and other cultures have traditionally had other labels than the west does. There's honestly no escape from the arbitrariness of it, but it helps to come up with some sort of system.
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 introverted or extroverted-- it often has nothing to do with how adults are treating them.
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.
>And if you've ever met a kid who stubbornly prefers to be introverted or extroverted...
My mom says she had an inkling I would be introverted (like my dad) and my sister would be extraverted (like her) just based on our behavior in the womb. I was very calm and nonreactive, while my sister was a big kicker and very reactive to external stimuli. Those personality traits have indeed persisted through adulthood.
Genetics would not impart all personalities, but generally would impart many autistic spectrum traits - which covers a large swath of social interactions - however keep in mind autism is so many genes that a parent may have a completely different reaction to something than their child, and the fact that there is a second gene pool.
For the most part, those genes have massive effects on hormone levels during development which has a huge affect on personality. In general this is why the linkage between personality and heredity is so hard to track.
Something nobody seems to mention that could be a convoluting factor...
I wonder if this operates bidirectionally - if parents learn traits from their offspring, maybe to a lesser extent. If you have a group of people that constantly spend time around each other, they all seem to average out their social tendencies over time, to some degree. As children get older and develop more defined characteristics, it's possible this isn't a one-way street.
I read this years ago in NurtureShock. Studies of adopted kids showed they still shared more personality traits with biological parents than adoptive ones. In fact they measured the two biggest factors as genetics and peer relationships with parenting being marginal. If you casually observe good parents with good kids or vice versa that's mostly genetic. Of course there's also a big distinction between personality and behavior. Parenting can certainly influence behavior regardless of personality.
Is there a good book on the subject? I am curious about the evidence and theorisarion of this for interests related to myself. As an anecdote, I have a loved adopted cousin that even adopted (unconsciously, of course) all our familiar psycho-somatic pains.
This article might be a good starting point. The author literally wrote the book on the behavioral genetics. His text book is somewhat of a hard read though. The later editions might be better though.
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.
Why would we be "unlearning" anything now? It doesn't make sense. What changed? Are academicians not monetarily awarded for attention-grabbing and breakthrough-sounding research anymore?
I mean, these fields weren't considered fields before. Sociology is a new field in that the methods it uses (the scientific method) are now being newly applied to social issues. There are several metaphysical and semantic questions to be answered here. Is the scientific method even appropriate for studying society? One prerequisite for the application of the scientific method is the belief that the laws being studied are fixed. Does that apply to every sociological question? If not, then the entire field is called into question.
In times past, sociology would be the realm of philosophers who would, after careful study (not scientific, just regular human intuition) and reading (so they could 'experience' past events), would come up with a framework of human behavior and then defend it.
I can anecdotally confirm that my kids are a blend between my wife and I, with my daughter currently closer to me and my son closer to her. I assume this will swap as they age into adults.
Why would you assume it would swap? I have found that major personality traits generally persist throughout life.
I was like my dad when I was a little girl, and I am still like him now in middle age (probably even more so now even than when I was young). Meanwhile, my sister has always been more like our mom.
I know there are studies on cloned dogs to determine if their personality is mostly genetically-based or environmental, with conclusions to the former. Here is one I found:
I feel this factor plays a huge role in rich/upper middle class/upper-class people staying rich or growing richer.
Kids that grow up upper-class imitate their parent’s approach to work and life in general, giving them an upper-hand.
Many poor kids are very smart and capable but end up imitating bad examples early on, making them handicapped.
One of the best things a disadvantaged kid can get is a good role model. Doesn’t have to be rich…anyone with a stable middle-class life to imitate is enough, compared to questionable characters some imitate (gun-toting rappers for one).
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.
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 great insights.
I dont remember all of the findings off the top of my head, but one was that relative social mobility (%s) for the US have been constant over time. Another was that economic mobility out of the bottom classes is dominated by poor immigrants. It is unclear if it is genetic, personality, or culture, but children of poor immigrants out perform native born poor by an enormous factor (2-3X better IIRC)
>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.
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.
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.
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).
It's complicated. Not all wealth is public. Only the wealth of the individuals who's wealth is tied to publicly traded companies: Musk, Bezos, Zuck, etc.
But we also have all those royal families from Europe and the Middle East, dictators like Putin, etc. whos' wealth are secret and very well hidden through crown estates, trusts, shell companies, all through Caribbean off-shores and often under different names. The best you have for those people is guestimations and some leaks from the Panam Papers to get an idea.
Are all decedents rich, or just a small fraction? Even if a family line has been continued for hundreds of years, there may be hundreds or even thousands of decedents of the original members who do not have access to the line of wealth. Also many families stay wealthy by only marrying members of other wealthy families. Marrying outside of the ruling class results in rapid dilution of power.
I usually see this statistic about family businesses. In the USA a family business passing through 3 generations is rare.
My personal observation is that the 4 generation has so many better options than the family business is holding them back with responsibility and the family unity has broken down through generational grudges.
That's losing their wealth, not becoming trapped in poverty. Wealth (as in hard cash) is fleeting. The behaviors that create wealth are not. I truly contend that, in America at least (what I'm familiar with), everyone can achieve a solid life. You might not be wealthy, but you will be able to support yourself and provide for a family. People losing their wealth does not mean they become destitute, nor should it. It just means they fall into a more 'normal' cohort.
That study was done by the Williams Group. Although it is widely cited across many popular news sites, it is surprisingly impossible to find the original study. Also, there's also almost no information about the Williams Group out there. No, Wikipedia page, for instance. Their web site says they do: "Government Relations, Public Affairs, Lobbying"
Totally agree. When I grew up, I was friends with the son of the richest family in town. I was once invited to dinner with them and was totally shocked they had real conversations. My family had a stable income and house but my interactions with my dad were basically him ranting about somebody else or me. I don't recall any productive conversation I ever had with him. Even now in my 50s I still struggle to have conversations and constantly have to watch not to talk like my dad. On the other hand I also took on a lot of good traits of my parents like financial responsibility.
My sister always had a better relationship with her kids and they have way better social skills than me or my sisters.
Examples or mentors can have a huge influence on people, especially when they are young. Some are good, some are bad.
This implies one's being upper class is a reflection of having better habits than the poor, which is incorrect. They just have more money. Rich people could not survive poverty.
I grew up in poverty, on food stamps. I do somewhat well for myself. My wife had a similar childhood.
We have poor financial habits that occasionally hint (I won't go so far as to say that they "threaten") at upending our lifestyle. Just having "more money" doesn't protect. Our habits would, if not kept in check, squander nearly anything. We are, in many ways, our own worst enemies. I've struggled to recognize this my entire adult life.
I think when someone starts speaking as you just have, it has as much to do with social posturing as anything. You have to say that, to show everyone else how special and empathetic you are. You understand the plight of the poor, that it isn't fair and they're "just like anyone else". That if some windfall dropped into their laps, they too would be rich forever, because that's how wealth works. And when you do this, you see everyone clapping and murmuring to each other about how enlightened you are, and you get off on that.
There are better habits. The wealthy tend to have more of them (many more), and the poor never develop those at all. Mostly, I think, because if they have these habits for any length of time, it quickly becomes incorrect to refer to them as poor. These habits can't protect against all misfortunes, but they protect against some and they mitigate the rest. And when you teach people that these things aren't true, you're doing them a disservice. You're robbing them of the one thing that might change their lives. It's both bizarre and cruel.
Yep, it seems like so many people are happy to tell children that their efforts and choices don't matter because everything is luck, and moreover, if they do try, they are a fool.
Cruel and tragic, especially when it comes from people who claim to be helping.
If you look at the differences between people who escape poverty and those that don't, you will find major differences in Habits and capability.
If you look at people who drop in social class and those that dont, you will also find differences.
If starting wealth was all that mattered, and human behavior had zero impact, you would see no mobility. I guess one could chalk mobility up to random luck, but this flies in a the face off massive amounts of data correlating performance with outcome.
Some of the richest people I've ever met have middle class or upper-middle class appearances. They do make good decisions, have good jobs, etc. We see some evidence in studies that wealthly grandparents are strong indicators of wealthly adult grandchildren. We also know that poor habits deplete wealth quickly (like with lotto winners). It seems reasonable at least some wealthy people have good habits and that at least some of the children adopt those habits and manage to at least protect the existing wealth.
Yeah, the ones I've seen have looked at things like even what type of assest the wealth is in (liquid, securities, land, etc). The type of wealth can be a factor in how well the wealth is remained.
Nothing in my comment was about survival in poverty. However, their ability to live within their means seems indicative that they have the discipline that they might be able do it. In fact, most people can survive in poverty - what other choice do they have?
Both can be true, if growing up with more money is a causal factor in having "better" habits (in terms of wealth generation/retention). I also agree that many rich people could not survive poverty. Both are adapted to their situations.
The problem is that this makes it harder to bring people out of poverty, because you're trying to pull them into a situation they're less adapted for. I actually am in favor of simply giving the poor (/everyone) money (e.g. basic income), but even I acknowledge that poverty-formed habits are going to be a barrier in that strategy's effectiveness.
We're not trying to pull rich people into poverty, so the fact that they wouldn't fare well there is moot.
Alcoholism, drug addiction, dying on the street on a cold night, lack of proper healthcare, and yes, suicide. I didn't think it'd be controversial to suggest that poverty can kill. And you're taking a strict definition of "survive" -- plenty of people talk about "not being able to survive" some situation if they think it would be extremely difficult and take a permanent toll on them, even if they might not literally die.
Honestly it's a completely moot point anyway, as I said: nobody is trying to pull rich people into poverty, so it doesn't matter how they'd fare.
I just think it odd that you predict their "survival" rate will be lower than those born poor.
I think it goes without saying that it would be a rough transition if you swapped two people. I expect the long term outcome would be better for a rich person swapped into poverty, than if the poor person who stayed.
I think this because they statistically and experientially I think they have more of the skills necessary to escape poverty: education, trades, social coding, ect.
You see this often with immigrants to the US, and is especially pronounced in the works of Raj Chetty and Ran Abramitzky.
When you take someone successful in one country and have them start over poor in another. The immigrants do better over the course of their lives, and the children of poor immigrants do FAR better than the children of native born poor.
This. I've seen enough people of all walks of life to say: the key difference between rich and poor is just that: having money. There's nothing wrong with that. Money is morally neutral just as the class is.
I'd say having a "stable middle-class" parent is the worst starting point to become rich. It's a sure way to become a similarly boring middle-middle class person - that is, a strictly conformist, risk-averse, boot-licking serf.
Kid of a rich person will probably become rich because they inherit cash. Kid of a poor person may become rich because they are ready to take risk and usually have good social skills. That, or they may die trying or end up in prison... But there's no good pathway to become rich if you come from a boring middle-middle-class. Too little money for elite uni or other ways to "hack" it, too little money for risk taking ("starting a startup because you always have something to fall back on"), and inherited attitude against risk-taking. Dead end. You just take up a mediocre white collar job and count years till retirement.
This isn't supported by data, of people in the middle income quintile 23.3% of their children end up in the top quintile while only 9.3% of people from the bottom quintile make it to the top[1]. The fourth and fifth(top) quintiles of income lead to the highest rates of children entering the top quintile.
It seems that this is a taboo topic to discuss oftentimes (especially academically), despite the fact that most people I meet seem to have an intuitive understanding that kids are often like parents.
It also provides compelling alternate explanations for things like 'children of abusive parents are more likely to abuse' that you also are not really allowed to discuss nowadays.
And perhaps the children of people prone to anger and violence are more likely to engage in anger and violence for other reasons that we have already shown numerous times to be causal.
The suggestion that personality or really any sort of brain function is linked to genetics at all seems to fly in the face of mind-body dualism and Hollywood-movie-ethics ("anyone can do anything if they work hard enough") both of which are things most people seem to hold very dearly.
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 cannot do, but taking action and choosing to cast off the traits of parents that you don’t like or think aren’t productive is possible. You can change and go beyond your upbringing.
You are a product of it, but you can decide to be different, I’m living proof. It’s just hard.
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.
It’s become a very tiresome rhetorical technique: “Listen to me yammer on vaguely but at length about a thing that I pretend I’m not allowed to talk about despite literally doing that right now”
Whatever aura of mystery and suspense this may have once imbued is long gone by now.
I think it depends on where in the world you are based.
I think the reason people have a problem with it, is because they think that this knowledge will crush people's motivation to do the work that is necessary to succeed. If your hypothesis turns out to be true, then only people that have innate drive, skill and resources will be able to do the work to succeed. Accepting that theory as true implies that there are also people without the drive, skill and resources and what is to make of them? Are we not all created equal? Should we not have equal opportunities? Should these lower-people be helped? Do they deserve it? Do they "earn" to not earn a lot of money because they are born from the wrong mother? In the past this problem was solved with religion...
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 'gotcha' - it would be much worse in actual academia.
I don't really understand the motivation for denying this taboo exists.
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.
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?
One example: in future studies of interventions at reducing child abuse, if we can use genetic factors to explain away some of the variance, then we can better identify interventions that are effective at reducing child abuse that we wouldn't be able to identify otherwise.
> Are you proposing some kind of public policy?
Not in that case that immediately comes to mind, but if we discover some interventions as mentioned above ^ it could be useful. In the case of the test scores affluence one, it might take some (although not all) strength away from some of the arguments for dropping standardized testing.
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 structure" and also her children is just not anywhere near supported by the evidence.
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 groups that say things like "It's not your fault you didn't go to college, it's [insert social structure] and therefore our entire mission is to change [social structure]."
> This is only true if you think that people are deserving of a good life merely because they have a certain brain structure.
What does "deserve" have to do with anything? We're not in kindergarten, this is the real world. If she is capable of being a satisfactory astronaut, then give her the job. And if she is not, then don't give her the job. Whatever benefit it is you think the job bestows, whether that is a high salary or some level of prestige matters not at all.
This isn't hypothetical, we're starting to see this as a real problem in professions where the success of our country and government (and for everyone who lives within it) depends on our ability to ignore asinine "deserves" arguments.
Which author presents those ideals? I think that runs counter to the "leftist" desire of equity over equality. I've never heard ex King say something to that regard. If anything it's a capitalist philosophy that "anyone can make it if they work hard enough", not a leftist one
This is arguably a different mechanism. Propagation of personality seems to be based lest on acute, specific, traumatic events like physical abuse. We understand to some degree why hurt people hurt other people. It’s less clear why and how much we emulate our families in more subtle ways.
There are cross-disciplinary, longitudinal, and meta-analysis studies which seem to support that when people experience adversity or various forms of trauma, they are far more likely than the general population to perpetuate the same or other harms upon others. It doesn’t strike me as colloquial at all. Psychology, neurology, and sociology each find this trend and various context-specific candidates for causal mechanisms.
There is evidence pointing against environmental unicausality. [0][1] Both these and the studies you mention will have trouble disentangling causality because nobody can run ethical experiments.
Right, I agree. We’re at a point where there’s an intangible and perhaps subjective aspect of human experience (maybe it reduces to consciousness in general?) which we can’t really nail down firmly.
I’ve preferred studies I’ve seen over the ones with contradict them (usually due to study design and the rigour behind them), but I’ll have to look at yours and reassess.
I think I’ve also leaned towards environmental factors in part because it encourages more prosocial responses if your morality is inclined in that direction. That’s purely subjective, and while not colloquially driven, it isn’t scientific.
I’ll have to think about it. I did feel science was more conclusively in the environmental spectrum of cause in this context, but you’ve got me wondering just how conclusive it could be beyond “seems statistically probable” while never being close to certain. Especially without unethical studies.
I’ll dig up some studies I’ve liked over the years to compare with what you’ve got here.
Of course this is anecdotal but it's obvious for me I do share several personality traits with my parents. I can see the same in many of my close acquaintances.
Of course this warrants a lot of social issues we simply don't want to face, but I always felt we were just trying to make them a tabu to discuss.
More anecdotes incoming, but I'm regularly told that I share traits with my father, with whom I don't share DNA. To the point that people who aren't aware that we're not biologically related have remarked that we look alike - which is amusing considering we're different ethnicities.
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 allows a person to make a slight nudge into a direction. Be it consciously or unconsciously. That is my theory. It fits my experience of the world and it doesnt violate any natural laws to my knowledge.
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.
It absolutely impacts the question - because in your example, there is no actual choice available on behalf of the person. All they have is their inevitable fate, as it were, that they are playing out. And while that fate may not be known in advance, it is unchangeable and fixed.
How does someone with free will choose one option and not another? Is it not their character or soul but determines a choice? How could they choose something different without being someone different.
I'm willing to believe that a Choice can't be predetermined or calculated before it happens. What I don't understand is why the choice would ever be different in an identical universe with an identical person making the decision.
This seems to be a paradox of free will. A person has the freedom to choose between options, but choice and will imply this action is based on something, and not purely random. If Free Will choice is based on something, why would the choice be different for the same chooser.
this is an interesting question. i have asked myself looking looking back at my life if there are any choices that i could have made differently if nothing else changed and i didn't know then what i know now. and my conclusion is that no, i would not have changed anything. wanting to believe that i could have made a different choice is wishful thinking likely influenced by regret about bad choices.
there was no decision that was entirely random yet strongly influencing the future.
however, here is an idea for a possible proof that free will exists: the freedom to believe in god or not. there is nothing in the world or in ones life that can determine that belief. sure, certain experiences can influence that belief, but nothing can determine it. we always have the freedom to either believe or not believe in god. and we can change our mind any time. on the other hand, the choice whether to believe in god or not is able to influence every other choice we make.
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 responsible for it.
If free will exists.
It's a rather fundamental philosophical question, actually.
Because those concentration camp guards and capos did pretty evil things, which were also (in their circumstances) often the least 'bad' thing for them. Which enabled evil at a truly massive scale against others because of those other peoples upbringings/genetics.
And those prisoners (most of which had no choice in the matter) mostly ended up dead, and stopped having much of a say in the matter.
This is why it's an important philosophical debate. Because if people play out a script based on their circumstances/upbringing/genetics and have no actual choice in the matter (philosophically), then isn't punishing those guards and capos essentially doing the same thing to them that they did to those prisoners? Hurting them due to factors outside of their (actual) control, even up to murder?
And if we think that upbringing/genetics was a major factor in creating that sort of destructive evil, doesn't that open up the possibility of tracking down and killing/punishing other people based on their upbringing/genetics? Regardless of any individual choices they had made? In this example, other potential concentration camp guards and capos - though it would play out as relatives and those with similar genetic traits and upbringings?
Which then creates the circumstances exactly that was at the root cause of the Holocaust to begin with? Namely, assigning 'goodness' and 'badness' based on some general attribute (ethnicity aka genetics/upbringing, sexual orientation, etc.) that cannot be changed or chosen, and NOT a persons choices (aka did they commit a crime knowing good vs bad)?
>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.
Ah, but the position of “My point is that even with free will, you have to have some difference in input to get different output.” is fundamentally at odds with having free will. Because free will means to actually have a independent choice. To not have the outcomes/decisions be predetermined or fixed.
But that position means all resulting choices are fundamentally due to the inputs, which means there actually is no possibility for a truly independent or ‘free’ choice, no? The outcome was inevitable when the input was fixed, de facto.
That is the crux of the issue.
Notably this debate has been going on as long as we have records, so not like we’re going to ‘solve’ it now.
the issue with free will is that even with 100% free will, life is an optimization problem. we can not possibly make a conscious decision for everything we do. we'd stop breathing. therefore we must rely on doing things by habit. and where do we learn habits? from our parents.
i fall on strongly on the nurture side of the nature vs nurture question, but the issue is that with the amount of habits and behavior patterns that we acquire, we simply don't have the capacity to change all of them without effort. we can change a few at a time, and each can take considerable effort to change. not to mention many that we are not even aware of.
in short, there is no need to fall back to nature as a reason for why certain behaviors don't change. moreover, even if a certain behavior is nature, i believe willpower can allow us to change that too.
what bothers me is that nature or lack of free will are abused to excuse certain behaviors as unchangeable. everything can be changed, because humans are very adaptable. we just need to carefully consider which things we actually want to change.
If people can argue they should not be held accountable for doing something bad, because they defacto had no choice (due to nature/nurture) - and people will take that seriously - then exactly the worse kind of people will never be held accountable.
And folks on the fence will hop over it onto that side.
Because consequences do matter for preventing most behavior (weighed by the rational and non-rational part of the mind), but punishing someone for something they can’t control seems cruel - and that will stop many people from applying them. Resulting in more damage and more bad behavior.
So regardless of if it’s true or not, treating it as true is fundamental for a functioning society.
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 (actually) no choice, or the choice was based on faulty information processing (aka actual insanity), then therefore there is no fault and no mens rea.
The underlying belief (philosophically) is one cannot be good or evil if one cannot comprehend a choice or it's ramifications, or in fact actually effectively choose between options due to a lack of knowledge and independent agency.
So philosophically, before that point, there was no 'good' or 'evil' because humans didn't know of such things, therefore were just acting. Regardless of what they did, they were innocent, because they were incapable of being anything else. After that, everything they did had such knowledge as a factor, and were no longer innocent - because they could choose.
So, for example, if I murder someone in cold blood (aka rational/thinking/choosing), that is 1st degree murder. One of the most serious crimes in any society.
However, if I murder my spouse because I found they betrayed me right in front of me and lose my mind (literally can't think straight, and react instinctively without being able to think or plan anything), most locations will consider me not guilty by reason of insanity, and let me go. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/temporary_insanity]
This is already a great example of the problem, as MANY folks try to claim insanity already after getting caught when they are not actually insane.
Another example is if I accidentally kill someone without knowing such a thing was a possibility. For example, I'm out hunting in the woods. I see a deer, and (as far as I know) legally shoot it. However, it turns out that was actually a human dressed in a very convincing deer costume, and I had no way of knowing this was the case. Most of the time, I would be charged with no crime, or worst case likely negligent homicide.
As per the Supreme Court of Iowa, "In order to be an excuse and defense for a criminal act, the person accused, and who claims [temporary] insanity as a defense, must prove that the crime charged was caused by mental disease or unsoundness which dethroned, overcame, or swayed her reason and judgment with respect to that act, which destroyed her power rationally to comprehend the nature and consequences of that act.”
If we assert that people actually act based on their nature/upbringing and have little to no rational control over their actions in fact (aka no free will), then does it not follow that no one actually has a choice, and therefore it makes no sense to actually punish anyone for anything they do? Since philosophically, without the ability to rationally actually choose their actions, they cannot be good or bad - they just are.
And if we punish people based on who they 'just are', that opens another can of very nasty worms, and likely a lot of serious evil will result.
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.
There is a feedback loop and moral hazard, so you need some fixed punishment as deterrent.
If a unique situation not likely to reoccur is an defense for criminal behavior, Then this rule provides the unique situation.
Imagine a rule that rehabilitation is the punishment for a first murder. For a rational person, this is a free pass to commit exactly one murder, because as soon as they do, they have every reason to avoid the 2nd and require no rehabilitation for compliance.
This would fall under the deterrence category no? Assuming free will does not exist the only types of punishment that seem by and large unjustifiable without the capacity to be at fault or culpability are retributive and restitutive punishment, for the same reasons we wouldn't consider it justifiable for someone not of sound mind.
Yes, my example can be framed in terms of deterrence. However, I think punishment can fill many purposes.
Retribution is largely in the eyes of victim, so the need is subjective and depends on their emotional desire for revenge. I'm not convinced that victims will be emotionally satisfied with the explanation of causal chain that goes back to the big bang.
To be honest, I dont really understand how the concept of restitution differs from deterrence and retribution. the cost is a deterrent, and paying it to the victim partially mitigates the desire for revenge.
I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but I think free will is entirely irrelevant to assessments of responsibility, fault, and culpability. Why should it matter if someone is a robot with bad programing, or a puppet animated with a bad spirit. In both case, they a black box which took an action in a given situation.
It seems like the game theory, emotion, and economics around punishment is the same in either case.
Maybe I simply understand the argument/theory why free will is a justification for harsher/additional punishment in the first place.
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 obey if you can. For an irrational person you'd have to use other means. This is basically how it works today.
Where does consent come into all of this? I understand that there maybe a difference in capacity to understand and consent, but not always. Irrational, for example impulsive people, can still consent. Normally consent isn't required for criminal justice to be carried out.
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.
If I understand correctly you're saying that people having a lack of free will cuts out the legs from the rationale for punishing people if they have not chosen to do something wrong. The five purposes for punishment as I understand it are generally deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution and restitution.
Retribution and restitution as punishments don't seem justifiable without free will or the ability to have mens rea, but punishments for the sake of deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation still seem reasonable if free will is assumed to not exist. For example incapacitating someone who is clinically insane and dangerous is already considered reasonable, and not on the grounds that they have using free will chosen to be insane.
The anecdotes don't untangle it, but academics sure as hell have studied adopted kids for traits that match their biological parents. Even more over have studied twins with identical genetics who grew up in separate households.
>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 conscientousness/underachievement, etc. So for example, if you're saying that violent offenses can be attributed to heritable personality traits (rather than environmental/circumstantial) in those groups of people, you're basically right back to the old and not-so-old eugenic and racist arguments about human behavior.
It's likely that there is some effect there, but the question is to what extent is that useful information in terms of education/discussion or setting policy goals and stuff. Also, there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot. (It's not hard to imagine that the same personality trait that tends to produce aggression could manifest VERY differently for someone raised in an environment where physical violence was common and necessary to survive, vs someone upper middle class, or someone in the CEO private-school class of people.)
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 correlation between parental income and standardized test performance is so high. It seems pretty obvious to me that there are potential heritable confounders there, but I would never feel comfortable discussing this publicly.
It's also frustrating because people will strongly implicitly weight the evidence by what they want to be true. Anything contrary to what they want to be true gets much stricter scrutiny than the reverse. For instance, "there is good science to support significant effects of environmental factors, so it's not like we're missing a lot" is simply not an accurate statement of the science. Measurable environmental factors don't explain even remotely close to everything. A lot (or all of the remaining) could just be random variance, but the idea that there just isn't much variance left to explain otherwise is absurdly wrong but people want it to be true.
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.
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.
For those who arent aware, this entire field is largely pseudoscience; though this paper goes out of its way to be fairly sincere in its modelling, it's still just nonesense methodologically.
The correlation coefficient is not a measure of correlation, but of co-linearity, and coefficients < 0.5 are typically bunk, and the entire system of computing correlation coefficients is bunk if the data is nonlinear. Almost all interesting phenomena outside are non-linear, esp. biology and higher, where nonlinearities arise from the mutual interaction of parts of the system. Here, the correlation coefficients are in the ~0.2 range. You might as well be staring at monkey entrials.
Methodologically, you cannot construct explanatory models of weak-effect non-linear phenomena from observational data. Basically, you can fit any explanatory model you like, since you can make any parts of the system interact with any strength, and since they are non-linear, this will reproduce any distribution you so wish.
You can entirely reproduce any heritability distribution, genetic covariance, "shared" parent-child, "unshared" child-child, etc. you want by changing this model. Observational data here is basically useless at discriminating. ie., i can make a model where genes are 100% irrelevant, or 100% determinative, entirely consistent with the observational data.
The only method which can distinguish here is interventional, ie., you have to actually control the causes of the system. However, since we cannot breed different groups with different genes; nor take the same person and run their life with differnet parents, friends, etc. you're basically out of luck.
I'd prefer we closed this whole field down, and any person mentioning "heritability" outside of a wheat breeding lab, shuffled off to some discipline less catastrophically detrimental to social policy.
You're clearly arguing from the conclusions you want to be true.
Nobody who is in the know and actually is skeptical of this branch of work (ie. people like Sasha Gusev) thinks it is as useless as you are making it out to be.
Adoption studies produce causality and even the GWAS (genome-wide association studies) stuff, while not necessarily causal, is pretty interesting.
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 evidence of a genetic cause.
But since all non-genetic factors are almost obviously mutually interacting, with "compound interest", no explanatory model can be fit.
eg., suppose your personality is entirely genetic: then why variation? Well, because of gene-environment interactions.
eg., suppose your personality is 0% genetic: when why genetic co-variation? Because people's genes covary geographically, and due to the trait selection of partners... ie., families live in the same geography, and people of similar traits breed together.
Why (very weak) correlation with genetic similarity? Because "compound interest" applies to the interacting factors, so even extremely weak geographical selection will compound.
It is entirely unclear to me how you're meant to discriminate between teh infinite family of models on either side.
Certainly, with correlation coefficients of ~.2, you're talking about pseudoscience either way. The causes would have to be extremely linear for such trivial correlations to mean anything at all, and they certainly arent.
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 of interest and increase the power of studies of human behavior. That's if they are purely non-causal and genetics actually has no impact whatsoever on behavior or the brain (a mechanistic stretch).
Sorry, but this simply does not match your rhetoric of 'pseudoscience' and closing entire fields down.
> Certainly, with correlation coefficients of ~.2, you're talking about pseudoscience either way. The causes would have to be extremely linear for such trivial correlations to mean anything at all, and they certainly arent.
I simply don't agree, but I can tell you won't be convinced on this point.
I'm certainly open to speculative generative (, explanatory) modelling of human populations to see what distributions of variation can be reproduced (indeed, that's what i'm doing). I'm less open to the reverse process: starting with observational distributions and then just fitting whatever model suits one's prejudices.
There's a cost to the latter when we know, a priori, that the "scientists" prior belief about what models to use are the most significant factor determining the conclusions of the paper; and that we know that the data is vastly too weak to distinguish between priors.
Compare the same problem in finance: this sort of linear easy-predictability thinking was a major factor in the financial crash of 2008; and it's something now widely seen with great suspicion amongst the financial industry.. who are well aware that "crisis" and "saftey" are both consistent with observational data.
I would argue that we live in a world of "pseudo-scientific social science disasters", the entire industry of measuring people and classifying them is one big Science Crisis whose effects practitioners do not care about because they aren't the ones being fired and loosing all their money (or have rigged these measures to benefit themselves).
Against this backdrop of, what ought be, researchers "going bust", universities collapsing, and research paper stock prices near zero -- i'd claim "pseudoscience" is a polite word. Esp. when those who should be long bust are still publishing papers immune from their effects on society.
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
as i mentioned in another comment, what bothers me the most is that heritability is used as an excuse for not changing certain traits and and as a reason to demand the right to continue bad behaviors
Well, remember: heritability of scottish accents is near 100%, and heritability of two eyes is near 0%.
Why? The covariance of genes with accent is near 100%: almost everyone who speaks scottish interbreeds within the same geographical area.
As for eyes: there is almost no variation in the species between the number of eyes. Since ~everyone has 2, no genetic variation whatsoever discriminates.
The co-variation of a gene with an observable trait is irrelevant when vast amounts of cultural (, geographical, social, etc.) traits cause (irrelevant) genetic variation. So "heritability" is basically nonsense outside of cases when the experimenter is actually causing genes to differer between populations (it was invented for the case of engineering crops).
Isn't that just an example of poor sampling/ test hypothesis? Heritability of eyes should be 100% (as predicted) if you include people with genetic blindness.
There obviously are genes for eyes, and they have a causal relationship with humans having eyes. They may have many variations that produce working eyes, but that doesnt mean the relation isnt causal.
Maybe i miss how this relates to your greater point that genetic associations are just coincidental, not causal.
Seems easy enough to test for the case of genetic intelligence. If you find a subset of genes within genetically diverse populations that cross culture, geography, and societies, then you would need a very strong rationale for coincidental association.
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?
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.
Yes, heritability is a population statistic for specific traits. I don't think anyone is arguing that individuals have heritability, just like individuals can't be "diverse".
> Knowing how much a trait varies, or fails to vary, with genes tells you nothing about whether its inherited.
I am not sure what this is trying to convey. Because I think there's clear cases where stuff is inheritable, and clear cases where stuff isn't, and that's a very meaningful distinction to make from a sociological perspective.
For eg. consider skin color and accent. The former is fully inheritable, the latter is completely uninhabitable.
A Scottish kid raised by Africa foster parents in Nigeria will still look like his biological parents and have their skin complexion, while he will sound entirely like how people sound in Nigeria.
One would be an idiot for trying to force him to have darker skin, or to have a Scottish accent, because we understand that one is genetically controlled, and the other is socially / culturally controlled.
Now in these cases it was as absolute as you can get with these things. But can we not imagine that there's an aspect of genetic influence on many other aspects that can also be somewhat affected culturally?
I don't care what we call it, but can we at least agree that this distinction can exist and might be sociologically salient?
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 are practically impossible or unethical.
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%.
