As I read your piece a physical analogy came to mind:
think of a pollen grain in a thin film of water on a slight slope. The pollen is the person (phenotype), that gets jiggled about randomly by water molecules (environment), while the underlying slope (genotype) imparts a preferential direction to the jiggling. Initially this is not obvious given the brownian motion but as time passes it becomes clear that the pollen grain has moved cumulative distance.
Now consider education. It is the attempt to direct those random jiggles so that they coincide with the underlying slope(s). It kind of works but fails in detail because it treats people as all the same where as we of course differ (in detail).
"That’s the effect of upbringing on personality: zero."
Of course one psychopathic twin becomes an axe-wielding serial killer, and other one only cuts it as a brain surgeon. Effect of upbringing on other outcomes (roles in the world) is perhaps higher.
(RE: aging. If I am hard to read now, try my early stuff.
> Of course one psychopathic twin becomes an axe-wielding serial killer, and other one only cuts it as a brain surgeon. Effect of upbringing on other outcomes (roles in the world) is perhaps higher.
If they were raised in the same environment, upbringing isn't what explains the difference. It almost always turns out that the unique environment explains differences, not the shared environment or upbringing.
(There *are* some caveats and complications, though - you might check my reply to Tove about culture, though.)
> aging. If I am hard to read now, try my early stuff.
I understood you this time around, even if you didn't close your parentheses. Do you write the same way that you talk?
In one way it is logical to think like your parents. But it also makes sense that IQ tests become more accurate with age because it is a question of maturation. I tend to think that people with high and low IQ in childhood might just have grown a bit faster or slower at the point of testing.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I try not to get into these kinds of details when I'm arguing a point, but yes, I think it's very likely issues like testing accuracy are at play. The idea that the "unique environment" has "an impact" is dubious when the scales we're using consist of self rated items, and a person's retested score can change by a standard deviation:
"On average, the test-retest FSIQ scores differed by less than 1 standard score point but 8.7% of the FSIQ scores... changed by more than 15 points from test to retest."
Once you account for reliability problems like these, it looks like unique environmental variance drops and heritability rises; the actual heritability of personality is closer to 80% in adulthood.
And even more than this, we can talk about effects in the other direction: All of these studies accidentally control for culture. We know there are cultural effects on personality and belief, but when every subject in your study lives in the same culture, those effects won't appear. These details really do matter - I just don't want them to obscure the clear and obvious way in which the effects of your conditioning are generally lost over time, in the same way that we discard our childhood clothing when it doesn't fit anymore.
As I read your piece a physical analogy came to mind:
think of a pollen grain in a thin film of water on a slight slope. The pollen is the person (phenotype), that gets jiggled about randomly by water molecules (environment), while the underlying slope (genotype) imparts a preferential direction to the jiggling. Initially this is not obvious given the brownian motion but as time passes it becomes clear that the pollen grain has moved cumulative distance.
Now consider education. It is the attempt to direct those random jiggles so that they coincide with the underlying slope(s). It kind of works but fails in detail because it treats people as all the same where as we of course differ (in detail).
...Yeah that's not a bad analogy for the way I think it works.
"That’s the effect of upbringing on personality: zero."
Of course one psychopathic twin becomes an axe-wielding serial killer, and other one only cuts it as a brain surgeon. Effect of upbringing on other outcomes (roles in the world) is perhaps higher.
(RE: aging. If I am hard to read now, try my early stuff.
> Of course one psychopathic twin becomes an axe-wielding serial killer, and other one only cuts it as a brain surgeon. Effect of upbringing on other outcomes (roles in the world) is perhaps higher.
If they were raised in the same environment, upbringing isn't what explains the difference. It almost always turns out that the unique environment explains differences, not the shared environment or upbringing.
(There *are* some caveats and complications, though - you might check my reply to Tove about culture, though.)
> aging. If I am hard to read now, try my early stuff.
I understood you this time around, even if you didn't close your parentheses. Do you write the same way that you talk?
no, I can come across as overly logical when i talk, at least to the artsy extraverty types
Try writing the way you talk, man.
In one way it is logical to think like your parents. But it also makes sense that IQ tests become more accurate with age because it is a question of maturation. I tend to think that people with high and low IQ in childhood might just have grown a bit faster or slower at the point of testing.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I try not to get into these kinds of details when I'm arguing a point, but yes, I think it's very likely issues like testing accuracy are at play. The idea that the "unique environment" has "an impact" is dubious when the scales we're using consist of self rated items, and a person's retested score can change by a standard deviation:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8967112/
"On average, the test-retest FSIQ scores differed by less than 1 standard score point but 8.7% of the FSIQ scores... changed by more than 15 points from test to retest."
Once you account for reliability problems like these, it looks like unique environmental variance drops and heritability rises; the actual heritability of personality is closer to 80% in adulthood.
And even more than this, we can talk about effects in the other direction: All of these studies accidentally control for culture. We know there are cultural effects on personality and belief, but when every subject in your study lives in the same culture, those effects won't appear. These details really do matter - I just don't want them to obscure the clear and obvious way in which the effects of your conditioning are generally lost over time, in the same way that we discard our childhood clothing when it doesn't fit anymore.