= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
drethelin comments on Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (215)
Interested in what you guys think about this. Jayman(hbd blogger) say's parenting has no effect on how children turn out. Seems empirically incorrect to me and it's just probably difficult to encapsulate the results/hard to see non-linearities to make it easy to reference.
He insists on twin-adoption studies contrary to my views.
Thoughts? This sort of seems like the two cultures divide we agree on. I might make a thread just for this.
Argument: Does parenting have any effect on child outcomes?
His view: Zero effect & Breast milk confers no advantage either
My view: Parenting has some variable effect that is difficult to encapsulate in the studies he references while maintaining the correctness and good taste of genetic arguments.
I cite decision theory, statistical inference, study design, and the related area as being primal over empirical references which have failed to encapsulate the effects he is pointing to in his observables. Statistical inference just doesn't work like that to give such strong conclusions. Any one who reads the literature on study design/inference knows that it's just not possible to give recommendations that are that strong. Sort of in the realm is Isaac Levi's "Gambling with the Truth" if not only the first few chapters although not quite, probably just statistical study design/inference in general.
Thoughts any one? I think scientists or empirical researchers are not used to being told that there is a higher plane of reference. Saying that there is zero influence is equivalent to saying all the relevant variables have been enumerated and assigned exact values for probability & effect and that there is nothing else to be assigned.
I believe my orientation is correct.
edit: I might add that not ONLY would that be saying that the relevant variables have been completely enumerated && assigned cost functions but that we are sure there is nothing else(no uncertainty) and that we are sure they all equal zero/canceled out.
I think dogs give us the clearest insight on this problem. Dog breeds tend to be vastly different from each other despite being genetically close enough to interbreed. Breeds have certain tendencies common that breed in terms of behavior, but if you really want complex stuff to happen you HAVE to train them. And on the converse side, no matter how well you train a chihuahua it will never be a great sled dog. I think the same logic can apply to humans.
Humans are capable of self-training (eg an ambitious child can go and learn physics on his own), but parents have a huge amount of control of the kinds of training kids get as well as the kinds of social contexts they live in (which Judith Rich Harris in No Two Alike argues is the main explanation for why children sometimes end up very different from each other even if they are both born to and raised by the same parents). Humans (like dogs) learn and adapt to the kind of environment they end up, with their natural genetic advantages and disadvantages playing a hugely important role in how well they do so.
Jayman looks at the failure of all the studies looking for parental influence and finds little effect, but I think he goes too far in dismissing it because he (like most of the researchers in the field) ignore the importance of context to behavior. This is not to mention that the kind of contexts and environments parents are allowed to put their children in these days are extremely constrained. Measuring different parenting styles on how well children do on standardized tests after going to standardized Prussian schools is of course not going to going to find that big a difference. But imagine arguing that kids will end up the same whether their parents apprentice them to a Blacksmith, send them off to join the Army, or give them to the Priesthood.
The 'dog breed' analogy seems to a common pop-sci way of talking about differences between human beings but there's no evidence that it is a useful analogy at all. The average genetic variation between dog breeds is far greater than between humans. Even the most dissimilar humans are more genetically similar than the average pair of dogs. But really, it's more correct to say that the genetic variation of humans and dogs is not comparable at all. Human genomes vary in quite different ways than dog breeds.
On the converse side, it does lend credence to the idea that nurture is important.
I agree with your sentiment, but presumably there's even greater variation among wolves than there is among dogs, yet most wolves are pretty similar. The stunning variation among dog breeds is due to variation in selection, not variation in genotype.
Perhaps you mean that despite large genetic variation in wolves, there appears to be small phenotypic variation in them. In terms of morphology and appearance this is true, but there's no reason, in my view, to think that it's true in terms of behavior and intelligence and so on.