It's not as controversial anymore attributing differences of athletic success to genes, but academic success is still a thorny issue . My guess is there is a lot of money and jobs at stake in perpetuating a set of systems and beliefs that don't work as well as previously thought (sunk cost fallacy comes to mind).
It is startling how ineffective basically all educational interventions are. I remember reading a quote to this effect in the introduction to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
“Teaching is a skill we have not yet mastered, save for to those happy people for whom it is almost superfluous.”
We have known intelligence is heritable for a long time. Anyone who has lived for a great length of time in a small town has seen this in their neighbours.
We have had twin studies basically confirming it for ages; and soon cognitive genomics will confirm it beyond the smallest shadow of a doubt.
It is a testament to what epistemic hacks humans are that we allowed these extreme priors to be overwhelmed by empty political fashion.
I would say it has already been confirmed. There have been three studies now using genes to predict educational attainment (easier to measure in large data than IQ, but very similar, as it turns out). We can now predict about 10% of the variation in educational attainment from your genes. This might not sound a lot, but if you look at the difference between the top and the bottom genetic scores, it is substantial. (Like, top quintile: 50% go to college, bottom quintile, 10% go to college.)
These are not just correlations. By looking within families, we get an unbiased estimate of the true causal effects of these genetic variants (because DNA is randomly assigned among siblings by the "lottery of meiosis"). Effect sizes are smaller than if we look across different families, but still significant and large.
Lee, J.J., Wedow, R., Okbay, A., Kong, E., Maghzian, O., Zacher, M., Nguyen-Viet, T.A., Bowers, P., Sidorenko, J., Linnér, R.K. and Fontana, M.A., 2018. Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nature genetics, 50(8), p.1112.
That cite is already outdated! The EDU SOTA is now 16%: "Genomic prediction of cognitive traits in childhood and adolescence" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/17/418210 , Allegrini et al 2018. (It uses some tricks to boost the statistical power of Lee et al 2018 - GWASes in general waste a lot of predictive power by not using multiple traits, realistic priors etc. So it's easy to do better.)
Yet there's the exceptional young man from the local solid and dependable farm family, who got a philosophy degree at Auburn, first in his line to do so.
The political 'fashion' is perhaps more about not pigeonholing people by fallible means, and more about giving them a chance regardless?
> Yet there's the exceptional young man from the local solid and dependable farm family, who got a philosophy degree at Auburn, first in his line to do so.
Why do you associate farmer with lesser intellect?
Change it to:
> Yet there's the exceptional young man from the local family of village idiots, who got a philosophy degree at Auburn, first in his line to do so.
I come from a family of idiots yet both myself and later my my sister got college degrees in STEM fields. And I'm not talking about a little dimwitted, my parents are really, really dumb and lack any form of self awareness or critical thinking skills.
I don't see it as particularly surprising.
My grandparents on my dad's side aren't particularly dumb, my mom's parents are though.
"Ineffective" doesn't necessarily mean "having zero effect". A system can be ineffective even when it has a positive effect, if the effect is too small considering the resources spent.
Reading, writing, basic math... those are things our education is quite good at teaching.
Anything else is forgotten by most students soon after they pass the exams. Those who remember are usually the ones who are interested in the topic; they often independently read more about the topic in their free time.
The system would be improved if those who forget the stuff wouldn't have to study all of it; and those who remember the stuff would be given opportunity to study it from books and have conversations about those books afterwards.
Look around this HN thread and similar discussions. What is the current fashion? It looks like it is the genetic determinism, and disregard for human liberty and self-determination. It's trendy to disregard the latter and engage with these ideas, in the political realm from nationalists to fascists - a large political trend around the world now - to the social realm with genetic determinism. It's no coincidence that the trendy political ideology has found science to cover it - it's exactly what happened in the 20th century with both Nazism and Communism.
The outcomes of these trends, if successful, are predictable; it would take ignorance, not a genetic defect, not to know what the consequences are. What do we lose when we sacrifice individual freedom and self-determination? Who gets to choose, if not the individual for themself?
Part of what maintains the current fashion is this assertion that knowing certain facts might turn us into monsters. It’s unclear to me why so many people not only believe this, but think it so obvious as to require no justification.
Note that the two monstrous systems you cite had almost exactly opposite views on the matter. Nazism as everyone knows glorified what you call genetic determinism, but Communism was strongly against such things, for both humans and wheat. They were going to sculpt the new soviet man, remember, by fixing his environment, and they failed at this. Isn’t the existence of evil on both sides of a question evidence against the idea that one side is obviously evil?
Both regimes were pretty keen on sacrifice, and not so keen on individual freedom. On the other hand, I’m pretty keen on freedom and self-determination. I’m also keen on knowing stuff about how the world, I don’t see how keeping ourselves in the dark will lead to better decisions.
It is interesting how "it's 100% genes" and "it's 100% environment" can both be 100% against the individual. In either case your fate is determined by your genes/environment, and there is nothing YOU can do about it. It is government's job to either select the worthy ones and purge the unworthy ones, or brainwash everyone into the desired shape (and purge those who somehow resist the brainwashing).
This is true, but "no real opinion" can also be 100% against the individual. Look at the Saudis for instance, anyone think they have bothered to have a strong position on this? They care about royal blood lines obviously... but that's different.
The problem isn't the science or anti-science. The problem is absolute power, which is all too easy to use for evil.
One thing to bear in mind is that university success depends more on being compliant to authority than intelligence, at least until you get to the grad school level, and maybe then too.
This is cynical in the extreme and essentially not true.
Doing coursework and showing up for class, is not 'compliance to authority' - it's just the process - and fyi voluntarily chosen by the student in most cases.
In most schools you don't even have to show up or do much frankly, you can just 'write the final' if you think you're a genius.
The workload in most programs surpasses the ability of 'just smart' folks to wing it, and so grades are definitely a measure of conscientiousness behaviour in the student as well as intelligence.
After 20 years of hiring I will take the 'good grades, reasonably bright' student, who was diligent and conscientious over the possibly genius person who didn't do much. 95% of even eng. work requires diligence, competence, focus, the ability to work with others, assumption of responsibility and a hint of leadership. I've never once seen a 'genius move' in my entire career where the totally brilliant dude made the difference. Maybe in some highly specific R&D things, but that's rare.
I should add: that 'someone is good at University' doesn't make them a better person, it doesn't make the more creative, moral, more suited to a whole host of things, it doesn't mean they're geniuses etc. etc.. It mostly just means they are 'good at University'. Which might happen to be a good benchmark for 'good at being a white collar employee'.
There's nothing tedious about the advanced math and CS classes at University of Waterloo, for example. The weekly assignments will crush you if you don't give them each at least 10 hours of solid work, but they're not tedious at all. They're simply that difficult. But they're only worth 10% of your overall grade. The remaining 90% is split between the midterm and final.
If you think you're such a hot shot that you don't need the assignments or the midterm to prepare you, they'll usually let you write and count the final alone towards 90% of your grade. Good luck, though.
The process absolutely involves skill and intelligence and most of it is not tedious. Doing a few sample questions, trying to solve a quadratic is not 'tedious', for example. Neither is coding your first little program.
Yeah but all the tedious hoops you must jump through to even get to that point are absolutely ludicrous and reveal college as the sheeple-manufacturing scam that everyone now knows it is.
"reveal college as the sheeple-manufacturing scam that everyone now knows it is."
Though college is not for everyone, it's objectively not a 'sheeple producing scam', and 'most people' know that. You're entitled to your opinion, surely, but I don't think you speak for the masses on that one.
I am tempted to say "Ah, how mislead you are, when did you last go to university?", but perhaps there's really different universities from what I see as the norm, who knows, I'd feel you either experienced a stranger university, or you don't remember it well enough.
Anecdotal: I am constantly on the verge of failing classes because to me it's really difficult to attend class, and because many points are assigned to the busywork that is attending class, I lose them, at this point it's a ritual where the (often really bad) teachers pretend to impart knowledge for two hours just to earn their wage. I easily perform way above other classmates when it comes to big projects and tests, of course I have to make up for my grade, but it's bullshit that I am "on the verge of failing" when I demonstrate great understanding and knowledge of the class material. Why is this bullshit? Because I am paying to be taught pertinent information, not to be put on trial for how much busy work I can put up with. But this can be explained because universities are not primarily interested in benefiting the students, their primary interest is on working as a gatekeeper for employers who (the majority) care a great deal about obedience above smart work.
There's extremely few professors good enough to truly warrant 2 hours of focus per class, yet many of them feel literally offended if students don't show up for class, it's a crooked system.
> In most schools you don't even have to show up or do much frankly, you can just 'write the final' if you think you're a genius.
> universities are not primarily interested in benefiting the students, their primary interest is on working as a gatekeeper for employers
But my experience was of a university that only cared about getting graduates employed to the extent that league tables included this statistic. What they really wanted was to trade people towards being academics (and would sometimes look with disdain upon capable students leaving to be paid well in industry instead of heading for academia).
My grade was based almost entirely on end of year exams with a token amount of assessed coursework (which was, like the exams, not specific to any course). So one did not need to attend lectures (and many did not, especially if the lecturer were bad or the student hungover). Doing homework was only enforced by the social pressure of not wanting to admit to not having done it, although if you didn’t do any then you might be punished (eg made to wait a year before returning) even if you do ok in exams.
Granted I went to university in the U.K. and other universities or the American system might be different (eg I understand American universities grade classes individually and if one signs up for a class, one will get a grade; whereas we did not have that and so one could attempt difficult classes that might not be taken to exams).
I only went to university a few years ago so I suppose this is a counter anecdote to your anecdote. Also if you really so above your peers and bored of your teachers then you should find some harder classes and some teachers whom you want to talk to. And maybe find some relevant university person to talk to about your difficulty attending class (although they mightn’t be much help)
>But my experience was...to trade people towards being academics...
Very interesting
>if you didn’t do any then you might be punished (eg made to wait a year before returning) even if you do ok in exams.
These are the rules I do not understand and find counterproductive, but your uni seems much more lax.
>you should find some harder classes
I have done this already.
>although they mightn’t be much help
Thanks for trying to help, but you are right, nothing would change, I am almost done with Uni so I'm about to put it behind, but I feel entitled to criticizing how inefficient it is, when a math class has 3 tests during the course of 4 months and they can be passed by studying for 4 days before each test without attending class, then it feels too silly and wasteful to me, but I have no choice but to put up with it.
I have some bad news for you: 'the grind' is most of life, and most of work, and if you don't get used to it, you don't have much of a future unless you can convince someone to pay you for your 'gifted talents' - and I can't even think of a single job wherein that is the case.
There are basically ZERO jobs that don't involve mostly grinding.
Even the most creative jobs - like author, painter, composer, athlete - do you realize they are just as much of a 'grind'? Authors wake up at 7 am, sit down and force themselves to bang out 1000 words a day - often if they don't, there's no book. Do you think it's enjoyable every day? No - it's work.
Bach wrote a piece for almost every day of his life. Quincy Jones spent all day every day for decades arranging and arranging music. You don't think he found that tedious quite often?
Professional composers will tell younger aspirational composers that they need to learn to work quickly and bang stuff out, or it's not going to work.
Do you think pro baseball players, who play a game every day for 3/4 of a year, for 20 years straight are 'in the zone' every day? Or maybe it's a grind for them as well?
That said, your lack of motivation might flip when you start working and you can see the material impact of what you call 'tedious work'.
Uni work assignments are not busywork, and I suggest strongly that if you're not doing most of the work, that you're not getting the most out of the experience. Those assignments help you internalize the knowledge in a better way than otherwise. And your professors may seem bored but hey, they have more interesting things to do like their own research. 'Teaching' is a secondary function of Profs. Many of them hate it.
If you are there simply to 'ascertain some knowledge' then maybe you should do an online U, or skip Uni and just read some texts. I'd advise against it.
Your perspective will change as you enter the workforce, have a career for some period, do a lot of hiring, and especially get exposed to Uni recruitment.
I would advise any University student (even my younger self) that if they enjoy the subject material at all, or if they have any affinity for it ... then 'that's as good as it gets' and to just do the work and move through it. You will get a lot out of it, and be a better person for it ... it may not seem like it right now, but it will with hindsight.
I feel like your reply is almost condescending, a "you will know this once you're old enough" kind of argument.
It's funny you mention teachers being bored because perhaps the problem is that teaching is done wrong, it's funny you also mention "maybe you should do an online U, or skip Uni and just read some texts", because that's exactly what I would do if wasn't so risky to trust that someone out there will take a chance hiring me without going through the systematic gatekeeping, with online Us there's an issue of finding reputable ones (at least georgia tech has an online MS program now, might give that a try at some point).
Here's the huge difference between grinding at work and grinding at school, at work you get paid for it, at school you are being made to grind because someone else thinks that's the best way for you to learn, it feels infantile, teachers should only be there to answer and clarify questions, and the material should all be written. Also there's a difference between grinding because you know it helps you develop the skills you need/desire, let alone money, and grinding because some jackass doesn't know how to teach and assess knowledge.
It's also not about being in the zone every day, people can be "in the zone" perhaps a few hours per day, being generous, there's a whole discussion to be had about productivity in knowledge workers in relation to hours spent working in a day, there's a point where more hours doesn't correlate with more productivity, but anyway, I guess if I'm going to sum up my reply shortly it'd be something like:
Not all work is equally exhausting, not all grinds are equally tedious, and not all grind is pointless tedium, busywork teaches obedience not knowledge.
I can recognize grinding is helpful, but I strongly believe university falls on the "extremely inefficient grind" end, and I feel entitled to criticizing it when it's supposed to be in service of the students.
"I feel like your reply is almost condescending, a "you will know this once you're old enough" kind of argument."
That's not condesending that's reality.
Accept the fact people with considerably more experience at 'adulthood' will have developed more knowledge from that experience.
"I strongly believe university falls on the "extremely inefficient grind""
You have no way of comparing it to any facet of life if you're a regular university student.
If you haven't even had a real career job, then haven't the exposure to lots of other schools, haven't hired from all over, from all classes and walks of life, from many countries and witnessed the difference. Then you're going to have a hard time judging.
" at school you are being made to grind because someone else thinks that's the best way for you to learn"
Maybe you've worked as a waiter? Or unloading trucks? That's 'mindless grind'.
Solving problems, reading books, researching and writing essays is almost never a waste of time. It's an exceptionally good way to learn, and 'not being paid for it' is irrelevant. For example, the only way to learn to write well, is by actually writing. English and Software! I'm ashamed to say I graduated Engineering woefully inarticulate ... because I didn't respect language and the Liberal Arts. I do now, and I regret not paying more attention. Many of my peers share my regrets.
"grinding because some jackass doesn't know how to teach and assess knowledge."
Profs aren't necessarily supposed to be great teachers, they are lecturers. It's your job to get something from it. If the prof is lecturing decent content, if it even makes sense, if the course work is rational, then he's doing at least his job.
If you're calling your profs 'jackasses' already now ... you're going to have a long, hard life ahead of you.
Consider that your profs are probably pretty smart, and fairly knowledgeable and that teaching a bunch of ungrateful teenagers is probably not that rewarding for them, as they try to do their research.
You could always just drop out and be an instant billionaire, right? Or you could put your head down, do the work, try to learn something, have some fun, make a thing or two get some decent grades and move on and be a better human being for it.
How in the world does "being compliant to authority" contribute to university success? What major emphasizes compliance over learning the material and doing the work?
You say, "I already know this stuff, can I just take the final?"
Uni says, "Yes, you can test out of it and get credit for the class."
I was allowed to take the final for any class I wanted to and if I passed I would get the grade I got on the test. I thought this was pretty standard as I've seen it at multiple universities.
Yeah. I can't help but wonder if the parent went to a school that charges a set amount of tuition regardless of how many hours you take (with the exception of part-time versus full-time). My alma mater does that, and I was offered to take finals if I thought I already knew the material as well. Though it was just for credit, not grades; basically the equivalent of passing an AP test for that subject.
I don't see anything in your response about success.
It's true that if you want credit for completing a major, then it is necessary for you to actually complete the major, but that still doesn't equate to graduating at or near the top of your class.
Eh, I do see his point though. I've been in a similar situation myself due to a transfer once in the past where, due to university requirements, I had to take a module that I was uh, "overqualified" for to fulfill major requirements.
I don't quite agree with his overall conclusion that university education is pure compliance off of this one gripe though. Moreover, I do believe that many universities allow you to bypass certain module via a test / some other demonstration.
I completed all of the courses for the major, with the exception of CS101, introduction to computer programming. I took many classes that ostensibly had a prerequisite on CS101, including additional nonrequired courses that could have easily been substituted for CS101. Nonetheless, as you say, it was "necessary for [me] to actually complete the major" by going back after taking CS4xx to complete CS101. Was this a required part of the major? yes. Was it a valuable part to be required without exception? Maybe, but I tend to not think so.
> I don't see anything in your response about success
"Not graduating" is a pretty clear way in my mind to "not succeed." I indicated that compliance to authority in my experience was necessary for graduation, which implies that it was necessary for success, does it not?
Completing assignments and tasks that are not about learning, as they are about compliance. Examples: attending class (big one), repetitive assignments, pointless assignments where learning is minimal but tedium is maximized.
I had a really authoritarian teacher that insisted to learn whatever I wanted and show 2 months later what I made. I learned iOS programming and sold an iphone app in that course and got a 90% grade.
I had another really authoritarian teacher that insisted to follow the book by the letter. I got a 75% grade, I was sad I was aiming for 55% as a signal to say that he was a terrible authoritarian.
Clearly authoritarian teachers should be the former, not the latter. However, some of my classmates begged to differ the exact opposite.
Interestinglt enough, these are all true stories. I wish they were hypothetical.
This study measures academic performance in non-identical twins with identical twins as the control group. It finds a significant difference in outcomes between non-identical twins than identical twins suggesting the role of genes in academic outcomes.
I am not a genetic researcher, more of a layman in this line of study. Some academics in social media (twitter) handwave and dismiss this research as inaccurate and they also feel its dangerous for such a study into genes (which might have ethical implications when applied to social policy) to be done without adequate interdisciplinary collaborations.
Irrespective of their motivations, I am interested in knowing whether such criticisms hold good for this study.
I feel like we must have done enough twin studies over the years at this point to conclusively say that genetic heritage is the most significant factor for a whole host of ourcomes. Environmental factors are alluring, because they offer the potential that something can be done, through toil and good works, to achieve improvements, rather than the more Calvinist tyranny of genetics.
They are also alluring because of the fear that policies could be put in place which excludes people based on the factors that are pre-determined; this idea is offensive to both those in favor of "meritocracy" and those who believe in the equality of opportunities. It also challenges the idea of human worth, since many people (mistakenly, in my opinion) believe human worth is (or should be) tied to mental and physical abilities.
For one thing worth is not measurable and depends on circumstance. Brawn would get you further than your game-playing abilities in many historical and pre-historical settings. Also, yes most people object to the central idea of racism, that people of certain ancestry are not worth being kept alive.
Sorry, but I didn't actually say anything about drawing final conclusions about individuals' predeterminations based on their ancestry.
What I will gladly say, however, is that individuals who don't contribute to the good of society (and this is easily measurable economically), are not worth being kept alive at others' expense.
(... except insofar as individuals voluntarily commit acts of charity.)
I use "trollish" to mean having trollish effects. Intent isn't a helpful category for moderation since it's impossible to observe. But alas we can and do observe the flamewars that comments like that one lead to.
You're the best kind of correct: technically correct. Different ethnicity+gender combinations do in fact produce differing relative-frequencies of IQs (and EQs, and VO2Max'es, etc.). However. These are only averages. Statistics. Scalar summaries of large groups. Human genetic diversity being what it is, you cannot confidently tell what someone's intelligence or strength is, based on solely their ethnicity. Attempting to do so, is what racism is. Furthermore, I am reasonably confident that there is no ethnicity in the entire human species which is incapable of producing, under the correct environment, an Einstein, a Gandhi and a Ryan Kipchoge.
However, if you were to examine an individual's specific genetics, and if we knew enough about the details of how every specific gene interacts to produce the phenomemon of the human body ... then you could indeed determine the maximum, predestined mental and physical potential of that individual. Not their children, not their parents, not their brothers, not their close cousins. Meiosis and mutation are (one of the few aspects of biology that I actually think to be) beautiful.
>Is there some implicit negative value attached to the hypothesis that human worth could be predetermined?
I think so, yes. It runs counter to the idea of a free and equal society, and necessitates setting up standards (subjective ones imposed by an authority) as to which qualities are good and which are bad; this very easily leads to narrow-minded elitism, for instance, preferring mental abilities over physical ones, or general intelligence over emotional intelligence etc.
The notion of social equality is important, in my opinion.
Why, necessarily, must human value be remitted by a central authority and its inherent fickleness? Or, more importantly, why does belief in predetermined value, cause a belief that the State should suddenly take charge of measuring value and doling out its consequences?
Mental and physical abilities seem useful insofar as they produce things of economic value. Different people, today, already, have different and diverse abilities to produce economic value; and as a result they come to possess diverse quantities of wealth. How does believing that people's potential wealth is predetermined, change things?
>Why, necessarily, must human value be remitted by a central authority and its inherent fickleness?
If human worth (I use "worth" because I detest the economism of "value") depends on abilities, there must be some way to collapse the qualitative differences in abilities down to quantitative values, to say that one person is worth more than another means that there is something within them that we can compare, separate from their concrete abilities but abstracted away. In the same way that 20 yards of linen exchange for one coat, although they are qualitatively different, there is a mechanism which allows them to be exchanged.
The translation function must be defined somewhere, but I will admit that it need not be defined by the State, assuming we're not also discussing the notion of rights and justice in relation to abilities. Perhaps I should have said "(subjective ones imposed by an authority, either the authority of the State or the authority of the market)". In my view, the authority of capital is just as pernicious (if not moreso in some circumstances) as the authority of the state.
>why does belief in predetermined value, cause a belief that the State should suddenly take charge of measuring value and doling out its consequences?
I said it "very easily leads to", I didn't mean to say it's a necessity. However law is based on principles, and if the times replace the principle of equality with the principle of pre-determined worth then the laws will surely reflect that.
>How does believing that people's potential wealth is predetermined, change things?
We weren't talking about wealth, we were talking about the worth of a person. I do not mean that in economic terms. Mental and physical abilities are useful for much more than producing things of economic value, and for the great majority of human history they haven't been directed to producing things of economic value.
> different and diverse abilities to produce economic value; and as a result they come to possess diverse quantities of wealth
The qualitative diversity of abilities is not logically linked to the quantitative amount of wealth.
> In the same way that 20 yards of linen exchange for one coat, although they are qualitatively different, there is a mechanism which allows them to be exchanged.
Indeed. But because they are qualitatively different, the opportunity costs of producing one versus the other are probably different; and if they are, then even if Alice can produce both more efficiently than Bob, Bob has a comparative advantage in one.
Similarly, one can say - and likely be correct - that an agricultural veterinarian is worth more than a stevedore. But if We, The Central Authority conclude that therefore We Shall Have ag-vets and not stevedores, then suddenly stevedores' value will increase, due to the decrease in supply as that policy is implemented.
> >How does believing that people's potential wealth is predetermined, change things?
> We weren't talking about wealth, we were talking about the worth of a person. I do not mean that in economic terms. Mental and physical abilities are useful for much more than producing things of economic value, and for the great majority of human history they haven't been directed to producing things of economic value.
For the great majority of human history, humans have been without the invention called economics-as-we-know-it-today. And economics - even in the absence of a market - can, at least, analyze almost all of human action and reaction. (With a free market, it can also drive it, with all the resulting decentralized emergently efficient behavior.)
Also, future genetic engineering can be used to both fix those unfair advantages, or even make the inequalities worse.
I feel, at this point, more energy is being spent in preaching things that are ultimately unscientific , rather than working towards fixing the inequalities.
Everyone argues whether we're more likely to end up 1984 or Brave New World. In my opinion, we're gonna end up with the worst of both worlds, and are already well on our way.
> I feel like we must have done enough twin studies over the years at this point to conclusively say that genetic heritage is the most significant factor for a whole host of ourcomes.
I feel like there wouldn't be so much discussion still if we had. I'm no expert, but as far as I'm aware the debate is still ongoing for a lot of areas. Epigenetics are also a big factor for consideration.
> Environmental factors are alluring, because they offer the potential that something can be done, through toil and good works, to achieve improvements, rather than the more Calvinist tyranny of genetics.
I think it's also we've just learned from history. People believing they're intrinsically better than others has led to genocide, the mass destruction of cultures, regression and problems that are still felt all over the world today.
through toil and good works ... rather than ... tyranny of genetics.
That is, until we discover that being a hard worker is also genetically heritable. Then people are twice doomed with less intelligence and less ability to work hard.
Excellent point. The study of genetics and its influence seems to be trapped between two extremes due to racial horrors of the 20th century. 100 years ago, social darwinists claimed genetics (race/blood) was everything. It was destiny. And as a result the world endured senseless horrors. As a reaction to the horrors of ww2, another extreme has taken hold - the side that claims genetics has no influence. To proclaim otherwise would make you are nazi.
The more sensible and correct middle ground, that genetics isn't destiny but a major component of many contributing factors to your life and success, seems verboten in academia and the public in general.
It's both obvious that genetics plays a role and it's equally obvious that environment plays a role. But due to historical baggage, scientists have to tread lightly.
If michael jordan grew up in the congo, he wouldn't have been one of the greatest basketball players. If einstein grew up in iraq in the late 1800s, he wouldn't have been one of the greatest scientists.
What the genes that correlate with academic success mean is easy to misunderstand.
Some may assume that those who succeed have 'smart' genes, but it can be that they are healthier. Just having better immune system can lead to better academic success. So can avoiding depression.
I think making someone healthier (protecting from a known defect in this case) is more understood, and therefore more probable and actionable than making them 'smarter'. We can't stop at treating just the symptom of injustice, without begeting our own injustice. History is bearing that out clearly. I feel, the difference is signifigant, and worthy of investigation beyond a doubt.
It goes further, a Twitter verified PhD in molecular biology calls it "deeply disturbing and unacceptable":
> This study is so deeply disturbing and unacceptable. Studies that link genetics to intelligence/achievement are so deeply dangerous. Yet scientists jump into them without taking into account the social context in which they're doing their work.
Yeah, I was referring to that thread. Without explicitly stating what's wrong with the study (in which many factors could go wrong), Or stating how/why environmental factors could still derail the study despite twin control, the twitter thread derails into "social responsibility" etc.
I have a political bias towards the left (equality, more democratic control etc), but I would never say scientific truth should be subservient to my ideology. That kind of a view has a huge stench of the postmodernist ideology on how even science is subjective like literary criticism.
Any ethical axiom is cannot be contingent on facts due to the is-ought problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem). But the moment some the moral axioms are used to make decisions in the real world, the decisions have to be consistent with the axioms. The effect of decisions is contingent on facts aka Science. So given a belief in induction, science can help inform what you "ought" to do with respect to your axioms.
Contrary to the subset of people in the left who blindly believe the Blank Slate hypothesis, or fear that genetic studies will change their ethical assumptions, I argue that more knowledge (genetic, sociological etc ) through science would only help you to be more committed to you ethics by allowing you to exercise it properly.
I think Steven Pinker's argument against (part of) left's obsession with blank slate rings true https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_...
Without a more in-depth analysis of where the study goes wrong, I'm afraid I can't simply take someone's word for it merely because they have a PhD next to their name.
Not that I necessarily agree with what she's saying, her comment isn't on where "the study goes wrong", but rather about the fact of the study itself.
In the same way that, for instance, an evil genius can be said to have created a "good" bomb, the "good" here refers to its efficiency, the number of people it can kill, the speed at which it can be activated etc. but these qualities speak nothing of whether the bomb is a good thing - for that question you need to consult the context in which it was made, and the question is of course different and mostly irrelevant to the technical parameters of the bomb. The ethics of killing have nothing to do with how long the blade of your knife is.
Fair point, although I feel that your interpretation may be a bit too charitable. If she had said that the paper should take into account the possible interpretations/implications of the research, then I can understand that. However, she said that the paper itself was unacceptable. I can only conclude that she would prefer no research be done if there could be negative ethical implications.
Actually she says the paper is bad science, and says why in her Twitter feed. She's actually calling for more research, supporting more complex narratives.
Meanwhile here, we're seeing that correlation does not imply causation except when it supports common prejudices and simplistic narratives. Then it absolutely does.
She states simply that it didn't look for proper controls or caveats. As I said in my original comment, I would need an in-depth analysis of why the study is bad. Merely mentioning controls is not enough to convince me, even if the person has a PhD.
And as for her "calling for more research", that is simply not true:
This is one open access article the world does not need right now.
She is literally saying here that it should not have been published.
I don't know what she could possibly mean by 'proper controls'. They're twins. They are better controls for each other (full siblings raised simultaneously of exactly the same age) than you see in 99.9% of sociology or education studies; in some respects they are the best controls that are possible, since you can't run a person through school multiple times to see if they get into college or not. And this study also came with polygenic scores so you can check the genetics directly if you've fallen for handwavy criticisms like of the EEA.
(Heck, she's not even right when she mouths 'correlation != causation', because if you used the PGS to compare siblings, their PGS differences are randomized at conception and the correlation = causation! As far as I can tell, OP didn't do this, just scoring unrelated individuals, but they could have, many other studies have, and she doesn't seem to've checked herself.)
I think blank slate is the common prejudice and simplistic narrative. Calling out the paper as bad science without giving any valid reason is stupid. If the argument had been that a single study is not enough to conclude the author's conclusions (which are not too broad). But one can say that to any study in a new/nascent topic.
But what is in the thread is that such a study should not have been published because it violates ethics, without pointing out the scientific flaws in such a study.
I know some female scientists who wouldn't want to hear anything about attributing differences to IQ or genes and become very emotional if the topic is ever mentioned. "I don't want to think of my friends from X as N".
Why not 'her social responsibility' kicking in? Because there it is, attributing 'weak' motivations to women, because of course women are all the same.
This would be funny, a comment that exhibits precisely why the argument it 'refutes' is true. If it wasn't sexist and demeaning as well.
> What's your opinion on the idea of scientific ethics?
Neither harm to the subjects of the research nor the ones conducting it is occurring, so it's unclear how scientific ethics comes into play.
Are you genuinely attempting to suggests that there some truths about the universe which are so inimical to the human spirit that we dare not reveal them? If so, the quote which springs immediately to mind is PKD's "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Most people regard ethics as rooted in emotion; we don't want to live in a society in which harm is done to people, because that contradicts our emotions about what is just. As such, the statement that science shouldn't care about emotions seems to imply that science shouldn't care about ethics, either - and this is especially important for those who believe that ethics are statements of emotion rather than appeals to objective morality. I wasn't speaking of this case in particular, but of scientific ethics in general.
I think by calling someone's error out as "maternal instinct" instead of arguing against it rationally, you have become the very caricature that makes their argument more valid.
> These findings suggest young adults select and modify their educational experiences in part based on their genetic propensities and highlight the potential for DNA-based predictions of real-world outcomes, which will continue to increase in predictive power.
I recently read the book "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" by Robert Plomin and it it was quite the eye opener as to how much the nature vs nurture debate seems to have been overtaken by genetic findings.
According to the book genetics seems to be the single biggest factor for a ton of things in our psychology. Including various measures of intelligence and achievement. As a layman the evidence presented seemed quite convincing. The book mostly refers to big studies with thousands of twins. To separate nature and nurture studies can do things like tracking twins given up shortly after birth into two different foster families who never had any contact to their birth parents later (correlated nature), track the development twins in the same family (correlated nurture) and so on.
According to Plomin the effects are huge (especially compared to what usually would be a significant result in a psychology study looking at nurture) and the controversial nature of such findings made the field extremely rigorous to the point where it is hard to imagine these results turning out to be wrong. Apparently it has all been replicated quite a bit by now.
To be honest I found the book quite shocking because it runs counter to so much that is "common knowledge" and "common sense". It basically mostly discards influenceable "nurture" as a defining influence at the population level. Once certain basics are met, relevant environmental influences are mostly too random to control and much of the rest is indirectly caused by "nature". "Nature" basically creates its preferred environment (called "nature of nurture" in the book).
As I am not in the field my ability to verify what the book says is limited. As far as I can tell Plomin is a very well regarded Psychologist and mostly know for his involvement in twin studies. If anyone in the field has better insight on how to evaluate what the book says I would be very interested.
Plomin himself seems to characterize it differently:
Another problem that Plomin encounters with explaining his findings is that people often confuse group and individual differences – or, to put it another way, the distinction between means and variances. Thus, the average height of northern European males has increased by more than 15cm in the past two centuries. That is obviously due to changes in environment. However, the variation in height between northern European males is down to genetics. The same applies to psychological traits.
“The causes of average differences,” he says, “aren’t necessarily related to causes of individual differences. So that’s why you can say heritability can be very high for a trait, but the average differences between groups – ethnic groups, gender – could be entirely environmental; for example, as a result of discrimination. The confusion between means and variances is a fundamental misunderstanding.”
That's what I tried to capture with the "at the population level" restriction. Plomin was quite clear that for the individual all bets are off so sorry if it sounded like the environment couldn't still screw you over (it definitely can). The part about inter-group differences is worth emphasizing and I should have done so.
That did not reduce my surprise about the things stated in the book though. If statements it contains like that after correcting for genetics "the most important environmental factors, such as our families and schools, account for less than 5 percent of the differences between us in our mental health or how well we did at school" and "Genetics accounts for 50 per cent of psychological differences, not just for mental health and school achievement, but for all psychological traits, from personality to mental abilities" are true, then I definitely consider that as going against "common knowledge" and "common sense". Definitely blew my mind.
Thanks for the links. Totally missed that it was discussed here before.
What does “smarter” mean. My brother had a friend for whom he built his RC car because this guy was uable to figure it out(and you want people to Race against).
These were kit cars you build from the ground up with probable 100+ parts.
Yet our non building individual went on to Ivy League universities and did fantastically well. Still incapable of fixing anything I am told..
I mean if u have uncontrolled add, depression or anxiety your university experience will suffer. Also any other long term illness. Success at university should be a spectrum.
When you study the biographies of many successful geniuses (e.g. nobelprize winners) you will notice that many have been selftaught. They arrive at university already knowing everything, because they read important literature much earlier. They might have read books about calculus at the age of 13, read Einsteins publications at an age of 16 etc. . This gives them a big head start and that is why most of them succeed easily at university.
There might be a genetic reason, why people do this. But in addition they also need to have access to important literature early in their life (maybe due to a supporting teacher or parents, but also simply by free access to university and online libraries). Otherwise their talent will be wasted.
Seems like there should be some parallel education system, which would work like this:
It would be completely voluntary for the student. The student would come and say what topic they are interested in. The teacher would give an exam/interview, to find out what the student already knows (and what they believe they know, but actually misunderstand). Then the teacher would recommend books to study, most of which would be available in the local library. (Also online resources.) The student would read the books at home, or perhaps in a local quiet place. Then another exam/interview, and another book recommendation. Optionally, group debates, where multiple students could discuss the same topic with each other.
There is an amazing amount of fixed mindset thinking amongst the armchair geneticists on hacker news.
Two hundred years ago, the median person could not read. They could not do algebra.
There is no doubt that some people are born smarter than others. There is no doubt in my mind that simultaneously we waste much of the potential of many people in our society and that the median human is capable of much more learning and output than they produce today.
I agree humans are capable of learning, but the growth mindset set claim people are capable of learning how to learn, for which there is little evidence.
The rate and extent of knowledge acquisition is limited by one’s general intelligence. You can not learn your way around a less effective learning apparatus.
I would also say that we have plucked all the environmental low hanging fruit. Lack of education may have explained much of the variance in outcomes 200 years ago. It does not today. We are educated to the gills. Dweck’s claims that we can squeeze more out of this desiccated rag do not ring true, even before you account for how poorly ideologically-pleasing findings have held up in the replication crisis.
I don’t think growth mindset interventions are going to do much of anything.
Programs like Head Start have been spectacular failures, which does not seem to be what growth mindset would predict.
Ultimately we are too focused on environment and have no focus on genomics.
Embryo selection will be far more effective than propagandizing our children with growth mindset memes, whose workbooks read to me like modern copybook headings.
1-10 embryo selection gives you 3 to 8 points per generation. This is basically possible right now. If we had a million genomes tagged with the donor’s IQ this would for sure be possible right now.
Iterated embryo selection and direct genetic engineering allow get you to many standard deviations.
Growth mindset is sneezing into a hurricane. And I am not even sure the sneeze is real.
I agree on your critique of the growth mindset. It's hard to teach. I meant more that we're looking at small differences in innate ability and deciding that we've accomplished as much as we can.
I strongly disagree with that. We do not have a research-and outcome-backed educational system. Teachers wildly vary in quality and approach and get very little feedback in order to improve.
I firmly believe a person born of average intellect should be able to master calculus. Most don't.
From Patrick Collison's Questions:
> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?
> Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. He asks in his paper that identified the "2 Sigma Problem": how do we achieve these results in conditions more practical (i.e., more scalable) than one-to-one tutoring?
I thought it was a good movie but morally backwards. Once we have the ability to select against alleles that decrease happiness, intelligence, health, sanity, and longevity we are are morally obliged to do so. His mother’s choice was as monstrous as refusing to let your child learn to read.
Would you subject your child to a 1 in 1000 chance of being brutally disfigured? Well genetic defects that cause much the same thing are more common than that.
The use of genetic measures over measures of the phenotype in that movie was silly. Cognitive genomics will never be as accurate as an IQ test. It would be a mistake to, for example, replace the SAT with a spit swab, even in a society with genetic engineering.
More important is basic human self-determination and freedom. I understand these comments are your opinions, but who are you to decide for me? Why should I be subject to your opinions, any more than you should be subject to mine if we disagree (and we do)?
Whoever is higher on the dominance hierarchy gets to subject others to their opinions. On HN it's a non issue
And for the record GATTACA is the story of a misguided insufferable asshole violating regulations and probably getting his entire team killed 5 minutes after the movie ends due to his heart condition.
> Whoever is higher on the dominance hierarchy gets to subject others to their opinions.
That's a bizarre statement in the modern world. In the modern world, we vote on whose opinion carries the day, and that is only in the unusual cases where government has power in the matter (because we have freedom and civil rights).
Our governments have moved to democratic republics, for the most part, but our workplaces are still generally heirarchies and feudalism. I see what he is saying. I see what your point is though, I think. Even in heirarchies, we are supposed to have freedom.
I very much want to experiment with cooperatives, and things like https://pol.is/home
So when the captain of the football team flushes your head down the toilet, you'll be happy to listen to his alpha male opinion of why geeks should know their omega male place?
What makes you think that we squander that potential? If anything, we seem to try to extract as much potential out of people as possible, given sky-high college attendance rates and that we aren't really getting much out of it, given that most of that education is really just used for signalling.
I personally don't see any evidence that we could get that much more out of the population and I think we even overemphasize education, leading to debt and underemployment.
Note that a gene "against university success" does not necessarily have to be related to anything you understand as a part of education (e.g. intelligence, conscientiousness, conformity).
For example, imagine that universities are discriminating against... let's use a completely random example here... Asians. In such case, if you measure how individual genes relate to university success, it will turn out that statistically, genes for being Asian are negatively correlated with university success. But that doesn't say anything about Asians' ability to learn or follow instructions, only how the current system is treating them.
Or if you take a country where women are not allowed to study at a university, or course the sexual Y chromosome will be among the ones most strongly correlated with university success.
So even if you find out that a certain gene is good or bad for university success, you still don't know whether this is about what the gene does, or about how the academic establishment treats people having the gene.
It's easier to control access to resources when you can imply, and then systematically impose, some way to exclude others from those resources. Emphasis on genetic determinism will just be another tool to do that.
Exactly. We're heading to a mix of the worst of Brave New World and the worst of 1984. Coupled with generic other dystopian realities, such as The Last Book in the Universe where the elite live in a perfect society separated from the rest, who live in a very dystopian one.
I have several objections to the paper and to some of the responses here; in fact, it's really got me hot under the collar. It is not clear that this study can support such sweeping claims. Further, due to the fast-moving nature of this forum and the high velocity of misinformation, particularly among certain elements of the online media (https://www.xkcd.com/882/), I feel that I must take the time to reply now rather than waiting till this evening if I want anyone to read this reply, and so I must attempt to digest a very dry, verbose work of dubious quality as well a substantial related literature ASAP, and I resent like hell having to waste some prime work hours to do it. Therefore, I apologize in advance if I seem a bit short-tempered, unfair, uneven, or less-than-rigorous in this response.
First, the paper itself. The buried lede is certainly the fact that previous, purely genetic studies based on bulk sequencing alone could only find a 5% variation in poly-genetic scores in the metrics for years of educational attainment ("EduYears") selected by Smith-Wooley et al (refered to from here on as the "authors"). Other papers cited by the authors find values above and below this number, but not exceeding %20. The papers broadest, proudest claim, that around %50 of various sorts of educational attainment (with correlations of 0.27–0.76 distributed across various "university success" variables) is determined genetically, is derived entirely from their twin study. Twin studies, at their core, analyse differences between sets of fraternal and identical twins. Fraternal twins share around %50 of their DNA on average, like most siblings. Identical twins share nearly 100%. Since both members of a twin set are assumed to experience an equal environment (the Equal Environment Assumption, or EEA), then differential phenotypes exhibited by fraternal twins and not identical twins can be explained entirely by genetic differences, or so it is claimed.
However, the validity of twin studies isn't settled science, and ought not be held in the same regards as, say, a computer-verified proof of the four-color theorem or the discovery of the Higgs Boson. In particular, there exists a large body of work questioning the validity of the EEA in particular(e.g. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/morris-singer/files/2008.p...). There are questions about whether twin studies capture the actual (rather than assumed) genetic differences between different types of twins, issues regarding potentially-heritable epigenetic markers, and the differences between additive vs Mendelian and epistatic inheritances. These problems, in addition to other sources of error, when left unaddressed and compounded over several layers of statistical analysis, severely weaken any hypothesis built upon the assumption of their absence. With twin studies, these issues seem to be especially apparent surrounding studies that focus on the heritability of mental disorders. You don't have to believe me, though. As always, you should do your own research.
Many of these problems can be remediated with additional research. For example, researchers can use questionnaires for the twin sets' families in order to ferret out unexpected violations of the EEA and unusual genetic circumstances. However this study seems to have been going after low-hanging fruit, using mostly archived data to reach its conclusions.
Regarding the responses, I see a field of slain straw-men as far as the eye can see, and a I see a collossal tower of ick being built on a foundation of shifting sand. It is disingenuous in the extreme to equate Enlightenment ideals ("All men are created equal") with some sort bizzare desire for a Harrison Bergeron knock-off fantasy. Literally no one wants that. Further, the idea that people should be uncomfortable with genetic reductionist thinking seems to me to be common sense in light of the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. Throw in the casual attacks on public education at all levels, and implications that we should bow down to a Calvinist tyranny of genetics," and I really have to wonder what is going on here.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a beautiful little ubermenchlet who just awoke from a nap to play with.
PGS variance explained and twin study heritability estimates can't really be compared, the former is just a floor which will be raised with larger sample sizes.
This article, and the Barnes and Simon article it is critiquing, are not exactly casual reading, friend. Are you the author of this article? Could you break it down a bit for an interested outsider?
In particular, if the EEA is not so important, what is the value of including fraternal twins at all, compared to, say, other close siblings? And doesn't it raise questions if a mathematical model gives the same results regardless of whether or not the assumptions used in its development are followed?
Also, what do you think of Barnes and Simon's reply:
I understand if you don't have time to answer in detail, all of the relevant paper is probably pushing 100 pages of dense inside baseball at this point. I merely wish for the folks with, ahem, deep convictions about heritability up-thread to understand that this paper isn't as unassailable as its press releases are making it out to be.
Thanks for your response, I kept checking this article/thread over and over again during the last day or two because I am precisely afraid of a world were our lives are "mandated" at a 100% before we're even born -I don't claim that genetics don't matter, I've always thought (even before I understood more and more the scientific literature on the subjects) that it's roughly 50% 50% in environment vs genetics, but the fact that "genetics" can be used to justify our political order and worldwide not for 100% of humanity but for only a certain percentage of it, say the rich or whatever, like it's happening here in HN en masse and like you correctly said that " Throw in the casual attacks on public education at all levels, and implications that we should bow down to a Calvinist tyranny of genetics," and I really have to wonder what is going on here.".
I'd be delighted to read an expanded response in regard to this subject by you :)
Edit: I like to treat this particular subject as dealing with the development of nuclear bomb. You cannot just say "oh, I am just researching this for the sake of science" when you clearly know that once you have that nuclear bomb and can put it to use, you can change the whole world.
