Right. Social media companies explicitly use the same addictive psychological reward mechanisms that are leveraged by companies that make slot machines.
As a non-smoker, I’ve never felt like I needed a cigarette more than when the credits rolled on Requiem. Certainly scared me off of harder drugs, though.
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
Not sure if this could have been more perfectly executed to discredit the idea of abolishing/defunding the police, which in my understanding has always been proposed as a structured, intentional shift away from heavily militarized policing toward a system of robust social services. I've seen others use the language of divest/invest to make clear that it's a shift in resources. Reading a little bit of abolitionist literature (because this stems out of a much larger, ongoing conversation about the prison industrial complex), it seems even full abolitionists see it as a process that involves building new systems and drastically shifting the American mindset around punitive retribution.
Instead, you have a situation where the police to abandon a precinct all at once and not long after, far-right groups start showing up at night to stoke violence. Hard not to read that as intentional.
> Instead, you have a situation where the police to abandon a precinct all at once and not long after, far-right groups start showing up at night to stoke violence.
Do you have any references to support that? It flies in the face of everything I've observed so far but in all sincerely, given the extreme polarisation in how these events are being reported by seemingly all parties, I'd not be at all surprised to find I've missed something important and would appreciate a source to clear things up for me.
https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/social-media-copies-gambling-met...