At most I would have expected debate about the degree to which it matters

It would be great if we didn't have to stress about a lot of the things that cause us stress wouldn't it?

Edit: I meant zoom classroom meetings in my example which is what schooling became when the pandemic started, not homeschooling with a motivated parent, emphasis on motivated.

And yet you want to debate it, so I guess it's also illustrative of my main point, that if people want to believe something, they will slice and dice data or subjectively add/remove nuance and skepticism to key evidence in order to reach desired conclusions.

I ultimately believe school quality is largely driven by teacher quality, and some homeschooling parents are high quality teachers, and therefore can deliver good results for their children.

In the end the content the first paragraphs quote is pretty close to what Hitler Germany propagate... (except that it doesn't speak out the conclusion Hitler Germany propagated and instead subtle implies it).

This is a religious tenet associated with recovered memory cults, not something that is true.

When I first became a parent I thought that all the things that I would do would build them up and make them great. This isn’t the right viewpoint. As a parent you have much more power to screw them up than to make them great.

Why? Because parenthood is subject to the same principles as all constructive endeavors. The most important to remember as a parent is that it is far easier to destroy than to create. Of course they are resilient and they are strong, but your ability to screw them up is stronger than your ability to mold them into your vision of success.

I don't want to mold my children into anything. They can find their own way to be successful, and I'll be there to support them into whatever they choose to do.

Make no mistake, by virtue of being a parent, you will mold your children into something. It's your responsibility not to allow that something to be objectively bad for society. It's possible that objectively bad for society is a very, very narrow range of behaviors. It's possible that objectively bad for society doesn't exist, and a society made up of a bunch of murdering sociopaths is just fine to some people.

Certainly, support your children in (mostly) whatever they choose to do. But you're also going to need to lead their interests to some degree, providing opportunities for them to discover their interests. And the opportunities and experiences that you choose to provide are already molding them.

> All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

One thing I think isn't being emphasized is that those authors aren't saying "parenting doesn't matter" as much as they're saying "you have little control over what kind of parental environment you provide, so relax and do the best you can".

You don't control your genes, your kids genes, and you don't control your environment. Those are the (super overly simplistic) factors that comprise parenting.

Another way to look at it is that, given your genes and the way you were raised, you're going to be a certain kind of parent. Given your kids genes, the way you raise them, and their experiences, they're going to be a certain kind of adult. You don't have control over any of that as a parent, so relax and enjoy the ride.

Surely you do control your environment, at least to some degree. E.g. when we were house-hunting, one of the factors that weighed pretty heavily was the environment (neighbourhood, schools, etc.) that we'd be putting our kids in by choosing a given home.

The kind of person you are is dictated by your genes are your past experiences.

All those factors are out of your control.

You were (are) only ever going to do the kinds of things you're going to do. So, in the context of parenting, stressing about what kind of parent you should be is meaningless. You're always only ever going to be the kind of parent you're going to be and your kids are only ever going to respond to that parenting in the way that they respond.

Amusingly, this also means that parents who are going to stress about being the right kind of parent are always going to do that anyways.

What if telling someone they had free will to make a choice affected the choices they deterministically made?

What if saying something is out of your control changed what you did versus saying something is in your control?

Even within the theory that things are "out of your control" due to some automatic mechanism, that mechanism is still triggered by exogenous information input.

It doesn't though.

Some parents, on reading one of these author's books on genetics, may alter the way they behave.

Some parents may not.

The way that either parent reacts to reading this "exogenous information" is dictated by their genes and lived experiences.

(But of course this is just my genes and experiences dictating my words...)

I'm just outlining the arguments related to this discussion from most of those author's works.

This podcast "Final Thoughts on Free Will" by Sam Harris presents some compelling arguments, if you're interested.

https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/241...

is that those genes and lived experiences give us the ability to change our programming, IE make a choice in changing how we behave, by adding new experiences of our choosing.

you have control over TONS of that as a parent, specifically "the way you raise them" and a ton of their experiences.

your kid won't become an asshole due to "asshole genes" they might inherit from you, but if you act like an asshole around any kid, eventually they'll learn to become more of an asshole

likewise, nice personalities aren't inherited, they're developed after birth (ever hear a newborn say "thank you for my existence"? so rude!)

Exactly true. But the thing is, you, based on your genes and lived experiences, are already going to be the kind of parent who will be an asshole, or you won't.

You are already either the kind of parent who will worry about being the right kind of parent, or you aren't.

Those choices are dictated by who you are, and who you are is already defined by your genes and lived experiences.

How your kids respond to you is also already defined by _their_ genes and lived experiences.

I have not seen any evidence to indicate that people have no control over their behavior and cannot change it based on the circumstances. It seems like a ridiculous example of fatalism taken to the extreme: "Your honor, yes, I killed that man, but based on my genes and lived experiences, I was already either going to kill him or not"

The decisions are determined by an intelligent creature weighing the choices and making a decision, which is often different when you have a kid around. I wouldn't be saying "asshole" if there was a young kid here, for example, mine or otherwise. Indeed, many the "experiences" you have as an adult, which continue to mold your personality, are consciously chosen by you.

If you’re really conciencious chances are you’re probably doing the right things to improve yourself and obsessing about it isn’t going to help. If you’re not conociencious then your not opening yourself to the kind of experiences that are going to make you a better parent so it’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

Where are you getting your data from for all these assumptions you're throwing out?

Like, one could say "If you're the type of person who swears a lot, you're probably not the type of person who is self reflective about it" with the exact same amount of confidence, yet be just as wrong (I myself volunteer to be the example which disproves the rule).

Often people are MOST self-reflective about their perceived flaws (before you potentially say that anyone with a flaw won't perceive it as one, I again volunteer to be the counterexample which disproves such a hypothetic rule)

> Often people are MOST self-reflective about their perceived flaws

And yet often they continue to engage in them. I don’t know that we’re disagreeing all that much except perhaps on the definition of “control”. I don’t think most people have the self discipline to control their own behavior so much as influence it, but maybe that’s just one of my flaws.

Again, where are you getting the data for these assumptions of yours?

>> Often people are MOST self-reflective about their perceived flaws

> And yet often they continue to engage in them

Here we see the goalpost shift: *"OFTEN"* being added.

If the rule isn't always true, then the advice, ("parenting doesn't matter") which depends on it always being true, is wrong. If people can, in fact, consciously better themselves, then the advice to not even try, because _we can only do what our genes and environment tell us to do_, is wrong.

So again, I'll be the counterexample which proves this rule wrong, for the third time in a row: I quit drinking to excess entirely, after previously being someone who, as you put it, _"believed"_ in drinking to excess. Should I not have tried? Before I did, you may have told me, "drinking to excess is just who you are due to your genes and your environment".

It’s also subjective, what person A sees as one category or the other person B sees as the opposite

At some point this becomes an argument of “what is free will” and I don’t think we have the time to answer that one.

If you've previously engaged in corporal punishment with your kid, and you think, "maybe I shouldn't do this anymore", the "parenting doesn't matter" premise I'm arguing against says, "hey, don't worry about that! hit your kids! in fact, hit them harder if you want! it doesn't matter, because parenting doesn't matter!"

so yeah, the "parenting doesn't matter" premise that most people here have said sounds ridiculous, does indeed sound ridiculous.

Arguing against my own article here, but what makes you sure? There's no gene for saying thank you, but there are very likely to be genes that affect broader dimensions of personality. In fact, the Big 5 are highly heritable. I'd say "genetics don't matter" is too strong, just lik "parenting doesn't matter".

The "newborn saying thank you" comment was a joke, as they generally don't say much when newborn, but illustrative of the point: newborns do not have any expressed personality to speak of, because genetics alone cannot create one. Your newborn has zero personality, but with the right upbringing, and perhaps the right genes, it will have a great one. With just the genes... probably not.

tl;dr the claim I am arguing against is TFA's "environment doesn't matter", and I am not and have not claimed that genetics don't.

Of course, it’s not 100% clean room. But parents do have control of massive portion of stuff in early years.

Living creatures tend to mimick, primates especially.

A primate surrounded by bad personalities will mimick them and develop a bad personality.

I think we both understand how a bad personality can affect one's long-term future.

It’s not exactly affecting happiness. It’s just laying foundation for personality and lifestyle.

If it leads to „happiness“, it depends on culture at the time of him growing up. And wether he will feel a need to fit in or rebel.

And have to admit I'm not a fan of depriving our communication of it. A trend that seems to be getting more and more popular these days.

Genetics gives you a range of possibilities, experience gives you a path through them.

There is an understandable but wrong motivation to free people from the guilt of any of their actions by saying things like "it doesn't matter". Yes, we do need to reject the extreme helicopter-parent attempt to achieve perfection, it's toxic and not all that helpful. Doing it by claiming nothing matters at all is wrong.

Sapolsky has several good series of lectures on The Great Courses, an into human behavior Stanford course on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA , and a few books including Behave. (there is a lot of overlap between all of these, you'll get bored hearing the same thing if you consume multiples)

Something I notice more and more as I age is that there’s a type of person who regularly externalizes responsibility. They seem to need excuses to absolve themselves of responsibility.

Parenting has been made so difficult by ever increasing standards of health and living, in conjunction with the continued fracturing of the extended family. It makes me wonder if externalization is a way to reconcile the impossible situation foisted upon many parents.

My wife and I have two kids under 6. We have a lot of money but almost zero family support. We cannot even begin to comprehend how people raise larger families with less. It seems impossible given how we barely get by at a socially acceptable standard.

Relying on family support right now with like no money . I’m amazed at parents who have little money and no family support and sometimes work multiple jobs. Lot of respect for those people as it must be hard and they power on.

As my uncle used to say, everyone he knew grew up poor, but they didn't even know they were poor until they grew up.

I find it adorable when young children are presented with some expensive present, they cry out in delight.. and start playing with the wrapping paper, ignoring the gift.

All these differences in opinion, all of which are probably true. It's almost like kids are in fact a complex 100 billion neuron learning system that cannot be usefully described by generalizations.

My family was well-off [but we didn't really know it until my Dad died]. We lived a comfortable existence. During childhood, Mom's purse was my bank (with her approval). Growing older and needing more than the occasional coin, I tried to arrange a regular allowance with Dad. Having been raised on a poor sharecropper's farm, he wouldn't give me an "allowance" without some serious tit-for-tat, usually involving days of labor (e.g., digging a ditch from the back yard to the front, painting the house, etc.). Working for him was best described by the phrase "wage slave". So ASAP I got a supermarket job across town, rode my bike to work and became largely free of family financial ties. I still remember the exhilaration of my first paycheck. Bonus: Dad approved.

It wasn't "our society or 'teenagers in the 80s'", it's you. We're all different, including our interpretations of events and other peoples' actions. Changing your interpretations, even now, can be very uplifting.

All they do is label and try to resolve symptoms, thus creating nice excuses for not fixing things that actually cause you some problems.

It’s like how drug and alcohol abuse policies that blame the drugs or alcohol don’t work.

Personally, I wouldn’t send my kids anywhere near such pseudoscientific charlatans; having experienced them myself as a child.

You’d do better to spend the time and money elsewhere.

I've known adults from lots of different economic backgrounds, both in absolute terms and relative to the people they were in immediate contact with, and the ones that grew up relatively deprived compared to their immediate social context definitely do not support your description.

Was listening recently to a rather successful young media personality (syndicated AM radio show, owns a fairly visible media company, etc.) talking about the material circumstances of his upbringing in the '90s: 2 bedroom middle class house in LA, family of 6: 2 parents, himself and 3 sisters. They somehow made it work.

Not sure about extended family situation, but come to think of it he also mentioned he chose his own house within walking distance of a worship center, per religious prescription.

You don't need an extended family. But some form of community that doesn't hate kids helps a lot. We're lucky to have great neighbors and we all help eachother with things. It's a bonus that they don't call the police whenever we aren't behaving like helicopter parents.

Beyond that, stop listening to (non expert) childless people about how you should raise your kids. They mostly don't know what they're talking about. Even if they are your friends.

It seems like a far fetched idea, but it's very much not. There's a large and popular trend today that "it takes a village" to raise a child. Much of the anti-racism propaganda from 2020 highlighted that the nuclear family was part of "white privilege", or "white culture". You can still find the Smithsonian's infographic, or watch the "$100 foot race" that makes these points.

It's such a tangled mess of nonsense that it's difficult to unweave -- but the premises is that children don't actually need a nuclear family, but American society has artificially created a need for it. It is perfectly sufficient for children to be raised by many different people in their lives. However, they argue that American society has been specifically structured to make that difficult, or impossible, with the specific intention of putting the underprivileged at a disadvantage, to somehow maintain privilege for the upper class.

Saying that the nuclear family was designed to oppress families without a father is like saying gravity was designed by thin people to oppress fat people. The fact of the matter is that children need parents -- but don't think that opposition to this idea is far fetched. It's quite a prevalent idea, they just do a very nice job of making it sound sophisticated and intelligent.

Those two concerns are orthogonal.

Not sure how much scientists feel this applies to family life in modern industrialized society, but I think it’s very interesting that there’s an evolutionary theory for why Grandma was always pushing food.

The system wants parents working and yielding maximum economic output at all costs, kids be damned. It was very visible with the COVID-19 pandemic. At least in my country, a minor research paper with small sample size finding that kids in some age groups spread the virus less than adults (while kids in other age groups spread it more) was prominently featured in the media saying simply that "scientists had found that kids don't spread the virus", while other contemporary studies saying that of course they do (as common sense suggests) were never mentioned. Of course, this was used as an argument to open schools and nurseries as soon as possible so parents could go to work (in theory it was because of education... yeah, sure).

The following I suppose is more country-specific, but in recent years, in my country, nursery schools have been officially renamed to "children's schools", with years having numbers (1st from 0-1 year, etc.) so it's indistinguishable from the latter school where they actually, you know, teach them things, and even uttering the word equivalent to "nursery school" is increasingly frowned upon by people who says "it's not nursing, it's education". And of course, language shapes reality so the underlying convenient idea is catching on, I have already heard parents who have the time to take care at their kids at home taking there instead because "they will learn more", "it's for their education" and such things, when anyone who has had a 1-year-old knows that what they most need is the undivided attention that they won't have in a room with 6-7 more kids and a single adult.

The public discourse becomes more and more focused on making us think that parenting has to take a back seat to today's work culture (lest we start to think that maybe we should change work culture to accommodate parenting) so I'm not surprised in the least that convenient scientific results start coming up on how parenting doesn't matter. (Not accusing the scientists behind the study of anything, by the way. Different scientists can legitimally reach different conclusions, but then the media chooses what to feature and how to frame it, like in the COVID example above).

Youth services embodies this idiotic attitude perfectly: they enforce an ever-higher standard on everyone ... except, of course, on themselves. Anyone living in youth services lives in poverty, in an abusive, attention-starved environment where most are confronted with trauma, drugs, crime, even prostitution (and let's not get started on the abuse situations IN youth services. If you want a kid to abuse, foster care is an easy way to get a kid the police won't believe. A parent using an isolation cell on their own kid will get thrown in prison, but they're the norm in youth services, even in "open" institutions)

The situation within youth services is that way ... to save money (but loads of money is spent finding more kids to throw into youth services, taking care of them once there, THAT cannot be allowed to cost anything. But it seems to me getting hit daily at home is preferable to the situation in a lot of youth care institutions).

Parents are punished if a kid even witnesses a small crime, like a fight. For punishing parents, suspicion is enough (no need for proof). That a kid becomes pregnant at 13 while coming back drunk daily is NOT a reason to take a kid OUT of youth services ... but a parent insisting kids take public transport to school in the morning against the wishes of a social worker IS reason to use violence against the kids and parents to throw them into youth services.

Yes. The financial well being of the parents matters! I was surprised the article didn’t even mention this. Some of the for and against examples can be explained by the presence or absence of money, education in later life, and simple nutrition early in life, for example. The authors didn’t really explain what parenting matters for, nor what the theory they’re countering is claiming exactly. But if what we’re talking about is financial outcomes (and there’s some evidence it is: “Twenty years later, those children were still earning more than the control group.”) then it does need to be stated that financial outcomes of children correlates highly with the socioeconomic status of their parents.

> The idea is so manifestly ridiculous that I suspect those who think it is true, want it to be true.

FWIW, I usually try to take that as a sign that maybe nobody thinks it’s true, and/or the author is exaggerating or oversimplifying history, and/or that I might have misunderstood what the idea is. My sense for the first two at least was tingling a little while reading this.

i thought this was related to:

mothers of growth-stunted children in 1980s Jamaica were taught how to engage their children with home activities to provide cognitive and psychosocial stimulation, their children caught up with their peers.

i understood this to be a study where all parents had the same socioeconomic status, but the kids whose parents were taught how to engage them ended up being better off.

but it also shows that adult education can have a positive impact.

when we are debating how we can raise the socioeconomic status of a group of people, the talk is mostly about better schools for the kids, but i have come to believe what we really need is additional education and support for parents.

I think this article ignores one key leg of "Parents Don't Matter" team's argument. It's not that parents don't matter so much but that peers matter a whole lot more. From Harris's Wikipedia article:

Harris argues that children identify with their classmates and playmates rather than their parents and other adults, and that personality is formed both through efforts to fit in with the group or to compete with specific others.

Kids are more interested in impressing their peers than their parents. Especially, in my experience, starting around puberty.

So obviously parents can have a huge impact on their child's development by, say, locking the child in a closet for the first three years of his life. But in most cases, the argument goes, parents' ability to mold their child to their fondest ideals will be greatly circumscribed by these genetic and social factors. For a parent to overcome these forces requires extraordinary measures (see the Tiger Mom).

My values at 15 were almost entirely dependent on my peers, true. But decades later, those have fallen aside and the values of my parents have endured in a way those of my peers did not.

I've had this feeling for a long time, but you have articulated it very well, thank you.

Not just extended family, but community too! Who still talks to their neighbours?

>It seems impossible given how we barely get by at a socially acceptable standard.

This kills us too (one kid, almost 2). The worst bit is that so much of the "good mother" performance doesn't at all lead to positive outcomes for the kid. If anything, it just creates burnout and resentment in the parents.

That's something I find myself reminding my partner of from time to time: whatever we do, it must be bearable for us for some time, possibly long. So let's not make a habit of burning ouraelves up; sometimes we need to do less so we can do more.

My wife grew up in a big family with a lot of extended family very nearby. She’s frequently frustrated by the lack of support that get from my side, and I grew up very far from extended family.

We are in the final steps of getting an Au Pair to ease the burden on her.

There’s a lot hidden in plain sight in that sentence.

This is a bit snarky but your "comprehension" is seriously lacking! You're looking right at the situation and not seeing it: people do with less by spending less. They "make do." You don't need to "comprehend"; you need to meet some people who aren't as well-off as you and socialize with them.

- The subtle interactions of the parents with the child during very early child hood can have a big effect on the child.

- It's possible for parents to unknowingly partially pass trauma to their children, likely through such subtle interactions.

- Even post very early childhood (but still in childhood) the subtle behavior patterns of their environment can have a massive impact.

- Sometimes seemingly mundane random events can have a major impact on a child.

- The behaviour of adults is often massively related to their child hood, through potentially in subtle ways.

If that is true thinks which are hardly measurable (subtle behaviour pattern and random events during child hood can) have a huge impact on a adults behaviour. (Hardly measurable as anyone non-trained to recognize them will mostly only recognize this behavior patterns subconscious).

I personally (from experience/what I read/what I heard from others) would say that many such things have more influence then the "raising strategy actively chosen by the parent" (assuming it's decent, non abusive).

Under the assumptions that this is true studies which try to evaluate raising strategies (and e.g. comparing them to genetics) are pretty much impossible to do , as long as the strategy doesn't have extreme drastic effects, and from what I know the only strategies with extreme effects are such which extreme negative effect, i.e. child abuse.

Interestingly the given bullet points do very well explain .. a lot.

From the vicious cycle around slums or "dangerous" black neighborhoods in the US.

To why an adopted child then the non adopted similar aged children from the same parents (from some parents trying to see the child as their own, but subconsciously slightly failing resulting in subtle behavior differences in mimic and gestic to other people, family members or foreign people having a subtle different behaviour. Children notice that, subconsciously, especially during early child hood. And it might, sometimes affect them majorly in subtle ways.)

Also the notion of "spoiling" a child through lack of discipline doesn't look like an old wives' tale to me. There are some wisdoms that have come up through the ages that are correct. Just look around - I try not to criticize parenting styles that are different from mine, but letting your phone babysit your kid is lazy, and you're going to reap the behavioral consequences for that, if you make that decision. It does matter the decisions that you make as a parent, and it does affect who or what your child becomes. Some interactions are probably subtle, but some are also obvious.

But you can analyses many aspects of it in isolation, e.g. short term reactions of very young children to subtle subconscious mimic and gestic from people around them. Similar you can somewhat study how trauma is passed onto future generations in some cases. You can also study how can e.g. realize a subconscious fear of the parent related to something then tend to develop that fare, too. Etc. Etc.

In the end you basically end up with many puzzel prizes which happen to fit very well together, but due to the limitations of science you can't prove that they fit. But there is no indication that they don't fit and logical reasoning says it's very plausible so acting on the assumption of it being right is quite reasonable.

so consciously parenting really means being consciously aware of my own behavior and what i model for my kids, because that is what they will learn. and being aware how my own childhood affects my own behavior is a big part of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences#...

Actually, I was curious about this and found https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01538-w - which indeed has Plomin as a coauthor. It's a twin study, and it does argue that ACE has an independent effect from genetics. In fairness to Plomin, I don't think his argument was ever that you couldn't screw up your children if enough bad things happened to them.

If we want to rhetorically expand the term "inherited" to mean "a parent may visit upon their children something visited upon themselves", then that weakens the initial premise of genetics mattering and environment (which includes the one the parents present, consciously or unconsciously) does not.

Indeed, from the article I cited: "HPA-axis function and depression are both influenced by genetic factors, which could increase the individual’s vulnerability to ACEs"; and here's an article that shows that being a victim of violent crime has heritability of around 20%: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.1....

if that study is accurate then some experiences can translate into genetic effects.

So, while a valuable result, it might not generalize to the the probable readers of this comment, who are likely in high income countries (and the high income parts of those countries).

The more compelling argument IMHO is that few studies capture the nuance of parenting style and outcome, having to rely on aggregate factors like education level and income. I'm willing to be convinced that my specific parenting choices won't impact my kid's adult income, but I'm pretty sure it will impact concrete things like politeness, and potentially even downstream things like overall relationship satisfaction.

[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

He called me up one day, and wanted to hang out -- mentioned it was his 14th birthday. I couldn't say no. He showed me places his dad used to take him, we got food, played video games -- it was a great time. But towards the end of the night he got quieter and quieter, and spontaneously burst into tears.

All he wanted was a call from his dad.

High school was a roller coaster, but he graduated. He's off and working a well paying job right now, and happy. I still tutor math, but the thing I've started to notice is the absolute void that's left in a young man's life when his father is absent.

Samuel Sey wrote[1] a bit on this, and the statistics are staggering.

1 - https://slowtowrite.com/absentee-fathers-not-guns-are-the-pr...

What is true is that parents want "perfect" kids and they have a million people offering a million different ways to accomplish that goal, and that is driving them crazy. That might seem like it is driven by love, but it is driven by fear (FOMO), and that will damage a child.

I thought this was an interesting observation that suggests that a lot of “conclusions” in this space are actually tautologies.

If nurture easily affected personality, we wouldn’t call it “personality” - what we call personality is exactly that which is unchanging in the face of a dynamic environment.

I am of the exact opposite opinion, given how much peoples personalities can change given input (think of someone spending all their time alone, and being depressed, changing their lifestyle towards going out every few days to hang out with new friends, and reportedly now having a "cheery personality", or simply someone with no passions discovering theirs, and then feeling like there is meaning to life).

There are a lot of co-claims that go into this, such as intelligence being genetically determined, and that there's a competitive natural selection process that results in the most intelligent humans acquiring the most monetary wealth and political power and hence ending up atop the social pyramid.

If you go back a few more centuries, you'll find essentially the same argument, but presented as religious determinism, i.e. the divine right of kings. This implied the obligation of the kings to be 'wise rulers of their people' as well as their right to absolute power, and that such rights would be passed on to their children:

(Burgess 1992) The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered, Oxford Historical Review

https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/574219

It's not hard to see that the concept of inherited divine rights in the religious era has been passed on to the concept of inherited genetic superiority in the rational science era - both being arguments in favor of the status quo when it comes to the structure of existing social power/wealth pyramids.

Now, the converse argument supported largely by Marxist theory in the 20th century is: Societal outcomes for human beings are socially determined.

This is widely derided in right-libertarian circles as the 'blank slate' ideology, and it's true that the likes of Lysenko used this ideology to push really poor agricultural and scientific policies in the Soviet Union that entirely ignored the realities of natural selection and basic genetic concepts in plant breeding:

(Borinskya et al. 2019) Lysenkoism Against Genetics... Oxford Historical Review

https://sci-hub.se/10.1534/genetics.118.301413

> "Progress in genetics and evolutionary biology in the young Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was hindered in the 1930s by the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who believed that acquired traits are inherited, claimed that heredity can be changed by “educating” plants, and denied the existence of genes."

Those are roughly the two poles of the debate, and as usual, reality falls somewhere in between. Plants may not be all the 'educatable', but human beings certainly are. There also seems to be such a thing as 'innate human ability' at the upper end of the spectrum of physical and mental prowess - i.e. if we take the same human cohort, and supply them with identical training and educational opportunities, some will do better than others. However, the notion that 'IQ tests' are a reliable measure of inherited genetic intelligence is utter nonsense.

In reality, children of wealthy parents tend to have far more access to educational opportunities than children of poor parents do (with outliers on both sides related to parental involvement as this article notes), so what we see in reality is highly skewed - not so much by genetic determinism, but by unequal opportunities and parental input. This seems like a solid, rational viewpoint.

I'm not sure you read my full comment, as I do agree with the article's claim that parental involvement does matter in outcomes. I'm just pointing out the two poles of the 'nature vs. nuture' debate and what their historical roots are.

Is that 'something' a satisfactory control for genetic determinism? That seems to be what the comment was arguing, not 'nothing at all'

This can clearly be refuted by the following argument:

1. Human nature has changed little over the past 10000 years

2. The capability of individuals has improved massively over the past 10000 years

3. Any improvement in capability must be due to environmental changes over the past 10000 years(nurture) as nature has not changed

4. Parents are responsible for a large part of your environment

I don't see how this nature vs nurture debate ever became a thing. Smells like leftover thinking from racism or something. IMO the only debate should be around which aspects of the nurture environment are the most important.

One more note to add: Interestingly, in homogeneous/"equal" environments, each individual is given effectively equal opportunity and environment - which will mean that the smaller nature-based differences will start to matter. So from a certain perspective, the more we fight for equal "competitive footing" in winner-take-all situations, the more will see nature-based properties mattering more, which comes with a whole whack of other problems (see the film GATTACA).

Agreed, this argument (#3) is all the proof we need for quite a few of the social debates we’re still having, including race. Gender equality is another one, people to this day suggesting that gender disparities might be due to “natural” preferences of men and women, while those preferences are in flux and different from country to country. It cannot be genetics, obviously, because genetics isn’t changing that fast. Too bad our human nature is such that we don’t always listen to reason. I would maybe add a 1a to clarify that human behavior has changed over the past 10k years, and using this lens is a good way to identify that behaviors that change are almost certainly nurture.

For real? There are plenty of sex differences that exist across cultures (a big one being that men are comparatively more interested in tools, and less interested in other people) that for whatever reason educated people in the West love to deny.

That said, the hypothesis you’re talking about has a low level and very specific meaning in the literature that does not extend directly to things like choice of profession. When you summarize it as “men are comparatively more interested in tools”, or “less interested in other people”, that is glossing over a lot of detail and can be completely misleading without context. It has little to no bearing on whether women like to write software or men like to be empathetic and supportive and social. The other thing it glosses over is the magnitude of the difference. Does comparatively more mean 10% more or does it mean 0.001% more? Leaving the magnitude of the difference out while saying one is more than the other is a way to imply the difference is larger than it really is.

Regardless of how "natural" it is for STEM to be gendered to the extent that it is (and from what I've heard, giving women more autonomy _reduces_ the likelihood they'll pursue STEM), you're always going to face opposition from this group because we have experienced the real-world policies that this type of thinking leads to.

I guess it's like eugenics. The fact that it may or may be true is beside the point - that train of thought leads people to justify actions that are simply destructive.

Not true. This data is 1) changing rapidly, 2) not cross-cultural, not to mention 3) cherry-picked time frame. There isn’t great evidence for this if you start from the year 1800, since all the numbers now are still higher. Numbers went up for a long time, and then started going down in the 80s. Numbers in India are dramatically different than the US. These things prove the changes are cultural and cannot be genetic, to the top comment’s point. Genetics isn’t changing this fast. You stated a recently observed correlation as though it was causation, an as though it was true for all people for all time. Causation has not been shown, and the recent trend represents a recent change in the direction of trends, and didn’t happen in all countries, nor at the same time. So if you think STEM rates today are due to only nature, then you’re full of belief that isn’t backed by science.

BTW the one single study you’re referring to is not accepted by everyone (replication attempts have failed), and had enough problems it had to issue a correction. Other researchers believe many aspect of the study were cherry picked, not just the time frame. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/women-ste...

I guess you could well be right. The science of it is not something I'm personally super-invested in.

Again though, the main motivation of my comment is because I'm mad about the blatantly preferential treatment that women received (as a result of people trying to "right historical wrongs") back when I was a student a decade or so ago.

> I’m mad about the blatantly preferential treatment that women received (as a result of people trying to “right historical wrongs”)

I understand why you and many people feel this way. Affirmative Actions are, in fact, preferential treatment which does put them in a category of bias and discrimination, and public support for Affirmative Actions is mixed. But it is a known bias undertaken intentionally, and the idea is that it’s temporary until we can show that things are fair (not the same, just fair). The idea is to combat the preferential treatment that men already receive, which we can prove is happening, but we don’t know how to fix. This one reason to consider not being mad about it - men absolutely received (and are still receiving) preferential treatment. The other reason I just hinted at - this isn’t a ‘historical’ wrong, it’s an ongoing wrong. (But it is getting less wrong over time!) There’s evidence for the fact that men are still getting preferential treatment, and as such women still have a right to be mad about it. But if we’re all mad then everyone’s pissed and nothing gets fixed.

How so? I'm a man from that era and didn't notice this at all.

All around the university, you'd see posters for bursaries and scholarships that turned out to either strongly preference female candidates or be for women only.

When it came to getting jobs in the final year, our female classmates would see multiple offers from Accenture, CommBank, Telstra etc. while the guys either took advantage of family connections or fought to get into a B-tier company (This was actually reflected in the stats; female engineering grads would be paid around 10% more on average from 2008 to 2016).

I still remember my old man, who was made redundant around when Tony Abboott got in (he was in the energy efficiency sector) being knocked back from certain positions and later finding out it was because the position had been earmarked for a female candidate.

I understand not everyone experienced it so personally, but bring it up quietly amongst colleagues and I'm sure you'll hear a few interesting things. Pretty much everyone would talk about it on the down-low back then.

Stay to the end of her talk to see examples of what science can prove about how social forces are both strong and invisible, even among people who consider themselves feminists. If you care even one ounce about how true your talking points are, consider watching the entirety of this talk.

> 3. Any improvement in capability must be due to environmental changes over the past 10000 years(nurture) as nature has not changed

Claiming that the environment is significantly responsible for how kids turn out is going to draw a lot of ire from those cultures (and subcultures) who consistently turn out lower performing individuals.

In effect, the argument that kids turn out better in a particular environment is equivalent to the argument that some cultures are inferior.

It is both scientifically and politically incorrect to say that parenting doesn't matter, only the color of the child's skin.

It is just all around incorrect to say that groups of people raise worse kids intentionally due to culture. Children raised by uneducated parents surrounded by crime are worse off due to their environment, and their culture is a product of that environment. It is only by the collective will of society (e.g., promoting enlightenment ideals over the objections of the superstitious masses, which happened longer ago in some places vs. others by political chance) that this changes. It is politically incorrect to blame people who are in these situations instead of bringing about the change to fix it.

Who said that? Looks and sounds like a strawman, otherwise why are you responding to a race-based argument that was never made?

> It is politically incorrect to blame people who are in these situations instead of bringing about the change to fix it.

Once again, who actually did that? Another strawman?

A culture that normalises or encourages single parents over the alternatives results in worse outcomes for those kids. It's an inferior culture.

A culture that values sports over education results in worse outcomes for those kids. It's an inferior culture.

A culture which encourages primitive and superstitious practices results in worse outcomes for those kids. It's an inferior culture.

The trouble is that you cannot actually win any argument in trying to "uplift" or "enlighten" people by asking them to reject what they consider parts of their culture. To many people, just pointing out that what they consider "normal" is actually detrimental to their kids is considered an attack on themselves by an oppressive bigot.

There are cultures who consider any form of non-humanities education to be oppression. You aren't going to fix them by simply moving them into a new environment. They usually take their beliefs with them.

Whites don't have the best outcomes, Asians have better outcomes (I think Hasidic Jews have the best, but I am not sure). That's not because of race, it's because of different cultures[1].

There are multiple different cultures even in the same race group! So it's quite confusing to me why you immediately and so quickly responded to a race-based argument that was never made.

Some cultures really are inferior to others, but I don't know how you'd go about uplifting those cultures at the bottom of the performance spectrum while remaining politically correct.

[1] What we really need is a study that looked specifically at things like Asian kids growing up in a black neighbourhood, or black kids adopted by Hasidic jews, or similar.

Who said I said that anybody said that? I was giving an example of something that actually is politically incorrect, which your example wasn't.

> Once again, who actually did that?

I figured that you might, and indeed you did in the next sentence.

> A culture that normalises or encourages single parents over the alternatives results in worse outcomes for those kids.

Slaves were not permitted to marry. Children of unmarried slaves learned how to live from their unmarried parents. You're blaming the victims instead of helping them. In the next paragraphs you claim that they want to live this way and that this can't be changed. After the fall of the Roman empire, Europeans didn't bathe except a few times in their life, living in filth and dying of filth-related diseases. This didn't change until enlightenment thinking forced upon them caused large culture shifts.

> Whites don't have the best outcomes, Asians have better outcomes

Tell that to Indians living in India.

Tell that to children of Chinese migrant workers, including the descendants of railroad workers living in Chinatown slums today. https://clb.org.hk/content/migrant-workers-and-their-childre...

Tell that to children of Nigerian immigrants. https://medium.com/@joecarleton/why-nigerian-immigrants-are-...

We aren't talking slaves, we're talking about people who are, by and large, free to make their own life choices.

> In the next paragraphs you claim that they want to live this way and that this can't be changed.

I did not make that claim, nor did I make any claims about slaves, ancient romans and/or europeans. Your argument appears to work only when used against extremes.

I merely pointed out that people right now, not hundreds of years ago, are free to make life choices regarding education. That certain cultures do not prioritize education as much as others is not a point of contention.

> Tell that to children of Nigerian immigrants. https://medium.com/@joecarleton/why-nigerian-immigrants-are-...

You appear to be making my argument for me - that race is not a factor, but culture is. Those immigrant Nigerians are the same race as non-immigrant blacks in the US, but have better outcomes. That very article clearly shows how that culture prioritises education.

Who were raised without both parents, which is all they know. This isn't some culture that they're saying is good and that they're trying to uphold, which you erroneously claim.

> That certain cultures do not prioritize education as much as others is not a point of contention.

That isn't. What is a point of contention is that you think they want to live that way and that this can't be changed. This was changed for many Europeans (and their descendants) long ago, though many remain superstitious halfwits who haven't yet been taught to think rationally and continue to do things like blaming people for their upbringing instead of fixing their environment.

> That very article clearly shows how that culture prioritises education.

And you seem to think that culture can't be changed. Nigerians in the west weren't always this way, and most Nigerians in Nigeria aren't this way.

I did not make that claim either. I said that pointing out the poor practices of some cultures are likely to be viewed by members of those cultures as an attack.

So, no, I did not claim

> people want to live that way and that this can't be changed.

I did not do this either:

> You're blaming the victims instead of helping them.

I did not claim:

> parenting doesn't matter, only the color of the child's skin.

I did not

> blame people who are in these situations instead of bringing about the change to fix it.

You've put all those words into my mouth, and then proceeded to argue against them.

You, on the other hand, actually did claim here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31707777 the following:

> Children raised by uneducated parents surrounded by crime are worse off due to their environment, and their culture is a product of that environment.

And then happily posted evidence against that claim:

> > Tell that to children of Nigerian immigrants.https://medium.com/@joecarleton/why-nigerian-immigrants-are-...

You ignored this comment of mine:

> There are multiple different cultures even in the same race group! So it's quite confusing to me why you immediately and so quickly responded to a race-based argument that was never made.

I actually said that race doesn't matter. Your "evidence" you posted about the Nigerians actually supports what I said.

I believe you are arguing in bad faith; you appear to have no desire for anything other than virtue signalling.

Which implies they want to live like this and want to uphold this culture, which is clearly stupid, and the point I have been attacking this entire thread.

> I did not do this either:

>> You're blaming the victims instead of helping them.

Is this you?

"The trouble is that you cannot actually win any argument in trying to "uplift" or "enlighten" people by asking them to reject what they consider parts of their culture."

Where by what they consider to be parts of their culture, you mean "a culture which encourages primitive and superstitious practices" (which sounds like American conservatives to me), "a culture that values sports over education," and "a culture that normalises or encourages single parents over the alternatives."

You actually believe that they want to be single parents (something that they learned from everybody they were around living that way) instead of learning about and having access to family planning, and you're blaming them for it. What do you think people are pushing for life skills, SEL, sex education, and science education in public schools for if not to fix this?

> And then happily posted evidence against that claim:

You're having a tough time keeping up, maybe having grown up in a conservative culture that does not value education (see how I can point out cultures that don't value education without being politically incorrect, as long as I point out how this can change?), but I did not contradict myself. These are two separate cultures, and one culture can change into another with enough political will.

> I actually said that race doesn't matter. Your "evidence" you posted about the Nigerians actually supports what I said.

I also said that race doesn't matter. My point was that cultures can change, which is the point I have been continuously making and the point that you have been continuously missing. "European culture" isn't uniform. There are many who have been enlightened and can think rationally, and there are many who are still superstitious and not yet capable of doing so. Their culture can be fixed, and it is not politically incorrect to say so, though many conservatives find that offensive.

> though many conservatives find that offensive.

I think I see the problem - you think you're talking to a white person[1]. It certainly explains why you so quickly rushed into the race argument when no such argument was made.

You come from a place of privilege and advantage, so you see no reason not to paint with a broad brush - you're always right after all! Anyone who doesn't agree must be secretly racist, right?

There's a lot more nuance to the world, and your simplistic and childish shortsighted view of how these things work are laughably ridiculous.

Of course, by first painting me as racist, and then as conservative, you've displayed that you have absolutely no idea what is happening in the world around you.

You've twice mischaracterised me, first as racist, then as white-conservative.

If you cannot even get something as easy as that correct, why are you so sure of your opinions, especially as it is clear you have not actually experienced or seen firsthand suffering under a legislated racist regime?

How about you first get the small facts accurate before you try making large empty gestures?

[1] I grew up under apartheid South Africa, seeing "whites only" signs that were literally legislated by law. I grew up under laws that forbid non-whites going into white areas. Education was legislated to be limited to non-whites. This wasn't back in the 60s either, it was the early 90s.

I don't think I'm talking to a white person. I think I'm talking to a conservative. Herman Cain wasn't white.

> It certainly explains why you so quickly rushed into the race argument when no such argument was made.

You continue to misunderstand that argument. My argument is that the culture of black Americans was shaped by the society they live in and what conservatives consistently fail to understand due to their simplistic world view is that it can be reshaped.

> You've twice mischaracterised me, first as racist, then as white-conservative

You're the only person who has done that.

> How about you first get the small facts accurate

Yes, please!

Well wait, have read a book by Judith Rich Harris (her followup to The Nurture Assumption, called "No Two Alike"). The basic thesis is that children have their own personality, and it's not the result of how their parents molded them to be this, that, or the other. She never says that it's ok to do a bad job as a parent, or denies that pathological cases of parenting can do damage.

There's an idea, going back centuries (perhaps millenia) that if you control the child's environment, you can control what kind of person they grow up to be. More recently, there's the idea that if you make any mistakes in parenting, your child will be scarred for life. Judith Rich Harris was saying that there is such a thing as "good enough parenting", and it does not require perfection, and moreover children are not blobs of clay that you can mold into whatever you want. If it were so, then generations of parents would not have been trying desperately to force their homosexual children to be straight, and nonetheless fail, and you would not have so many cases where one sibling is the black sheep of the family while the others overachieve. Children have their own nature, and no two are alike, is what JRH said, and it was in contradiction to what Skinner and other behaviorists had said. The evidence is overwhelming that she is correct.

- Could someone who's never learned calculus be expect to apply it to a problem?

- Could someone with little experience in reading be expected to write well?

- Could someone who had little education in his or her childhood, but taught a robust education in his 20s and 30s (or later) be expected to perform as someone who learned it younger?

- If someone spends his 20s in jail, would you expect him to be able to get a white-color job afterwards?

- A smart person does damage to his cognitive abilities by drugs etc, both acute and chronic/permanent. Is this a nature or nurture consideration? What about the genetic and environmental factors that lead to this drug use?

- A smart person learns and becomes proficient at a skill in a month. A less-smart person struggles in the first month, but keeps at it, and becomes proficient in 6 months. For that skill, (This is almost a tautology), would they perform the task at an acceptable level?

My point is that we should consider a model where capabilities are based on physical qualities that are largely unchangeable (for the better). A distinction from genetics: The base is genetics, but other things like injuries also play this. However, skills and learning are linked heavily with the nurture side. Genetics etc plays an important role of how well someone can learn something, but the learning still must occur through information acquired and sorted in the brain after birth.

Stated another way: It's clear that humans (And to a lesser extent other mammals) rely on a childhood full of nurture and learning. Physical touch, social interactions, learning skills, etc. This alone is enough to debunk the strawman in the article, even if you recognize the critical role of genetics.

Another more common example is the Asian-American tiger moms who vigorously push their children into academics and music. There’s no doubt that those children would turn out different if they were just raised on X-box and pizza rolls.

We all agree you should give loving attention to your newborn and read to your kids, but its the helicoptering and obscene optimization that modern parents are prone to that I have found people are pushing back on.

All the studies he cites seem to focus on direct attention and behavior modeling as the key parental inputs. Maybe parents should just focus on being present/loving/educative and forget about the piano lessons and prestigious private schools.