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mattnewport comments on The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is soliciting ideas - Less Wrong
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You mean in general or for rationality in particular? Lots of things are heritable, to varying (and often disputed) extents. I tend to think genetic factors are often underestimated when explaining human variability. I'm not familiar enough with the evidence for heritability of other high level cognitive abilities to make a very good estimate for the heritability of rationality however.
I've just bought What Intelligence Tests Miss for my Kindle after reading the article series here. As I said, I'm skeptical that rationality as an independent factor from IQ is strongly heritable but I'm open to evidence to the contrary which is why I was curious if you had any.
No, it's not, but I think it's a reasonable excuse for not having a more specific prior than 'low and uncertain'. Being more specific in my prior would not be very useful without being more specific about what exactly the question is. I sometimes see a tendency here to overconfidence in estimates simply because a bunch of rather arbitrary priors have been multiplied together and produced a comfortingly precise number.
I don't know what it is. I suspect it is not a well established piece of information. I'm not convinced that heritability for 'traits-in-general' is a good basis for rationality in particular. Do you have a reference for a good estimate for this distribution?
I never qualified 'low' with 'very' or 'really'. If numbers make you feel better 'low' means roughly 1-10% probability. I find it a little backwards when someone focuses so much on precisely quantifying an estimate like this before the exact question is even clarified. I see it a lot from non-technical managers as a programmer.
I started this thread by asking for the information you were using to arrive at your (implied) high confidence in a genetic basis for rationality. There's been several recent articles about What Intelligence Tests Miss and I haven't started reading it yet (though it is now sitting on my Kindle) so I was already thinking about whether rationality as a separate trait from IQ is a distinct and measurable trait. I haven't seen enough evidence yet to convince me that it is so your implication that it is and is strongly heritable made me wonder if you were privy to some information that I didn't know.
While assigning numerical probabilities to priors and doing some math can be useful for certain problems I don't think it is necessarily the best starting point when investigating complex issues like this with actual human brains rather than ideal Bayesian reasoning agents. I'm still in data gathering mode at the moment and don't see a great benefit to throwing out exact priors as a badge of Bayesian honor.
This is what I meant about quantifying the probability estimate before clarifying the exact question. As I said originally, I'm skeptical of a strong heritability for rationality independent of IQ. I'm not sure what the correct statistical terminology is for talking about this kind of question. I think there is a low probability that a targeted genetic modification could increase rationality independent of IQ in a significant and measurable way. That belief doesn't map in a straightforward way onto a claim about the heritability of rationality. I'm expecting What Intelligence Tests Miss to help clarify my thinking about what kind of test could even be used to reliably separate a 'rationality' cognitive trait from IQ which would be a necessary precondition to measuring the heritability of rationality.
These all correlate significantly with IQ however I believe (correct me if you think I'm wrong on this). It's at least plausible that targeted genetic modifications could improve say spatial or verbal reasoning significantly more than IQ (perhaps by lowering scores in other areas) since there is some evidence of sex differences in these traits. Rationality seems more like a way of reasoning and a higher level trait than these 'specialized' forms of intelligence however.
I realize that "brain module" != "distinct patch of cortex real estate", but have there been any cases of brain damage that have increased a person's rationality in some areas?
I am aware that depression and certain autism spectrum traits have this property, but I'm curious if physical trauma has done anything similar.
You can apply laws of probability to intuitive notions of plausibility as well (and some informal arguments won't be valid if they violate these laws, like both X and ~X being unexpected). Specific numbers don't have to be thought up to do that.