The only part I disagree with is the historical perspective. When was this time that people believed in personal growth? For most of history the nobels were nobels, peasants were peasants and that was that. If anything, the sense of having dynamic control of one's destiny throughout one's lifespan is a recent invention. (Well at least in the west)
Absolutely with you. The great dissonance is between people's expectations and their reality, not the past and the present. Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding.
> Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding.
Not really. A century ago people in many parts of the USA were dirt poor. I mean no savings, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. But they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted themselves. They had deep communal bonds, spiritual fulfillment, and a sense of meaning in their lives that is increasingly absent. I wouldn’t be surprised if your average sharecropper’s wife would blow away your average urban girl boss in self reported happiness.
I'm sorry but that's just pining for a past that never happened. In the 20th century some 100 million people died from famine. Starved to death. We're down to 200,000 deaths from hunger per year, compared to an average of maybe 2M/year up to the 1960s, while the global population tripled.
Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely. But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.
> I'm sorry but that's just pining for a past that never happened. In the 20th century some 100 million people died from famine. Starved to death. We're down to 200,000 deaths from hunger per year, compared to an average of maybe 2M/year up to the 1960s, while the global population tripled.
Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely.
I'm sorry, but perhaps it wasn't clear from context that I'm talking about the USA. There has never been a wide scale famine in the United States even in its poorest communities. Even during the Great Depression there were virtually no deaths due to starvation[1].
> But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.
Your goalpost-moving notwithstanding, I'm reminded of that famous Sufi tale with the refrain "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?" After all the environmental impacts of the population explosion that it kicked off are still just barely beginning to be felt. But for what it's worth the Green Revolution was part of the standard curriculum when I was in middle and secondary school, so I wouldn't say it's unrecognized.
They were not well fed a century ago. The US had to start putting iron and iodine in all the food because all the young men were too weak and sick with pellagra to be able to fight in wars.
Reported happiness seems like a poor metric for comparison when the concept itself may be rather foreign to someone in the past. If your life is mostly hardship, you may not spend much time being introspective about how you feel about your plight. In a life of luxury, you have nothing but time to think about it and find things to critique. So, you may have an objectively better life, and overall more happiness, but report it as unhappy because there is more that you want to do that you feel should be achievable. Compared to someone who couldn’t comprehend their situation ever improving, so they. There is no basis for comparison of what it means to be happy between different life experiences.
It’s not about quality of life. Abuse victims will say they are happy, and stay with their abusers. War veterans can think fondly on their time at war, but neither are objectively good situations. Reporting that you are happy is not the same as being happy.
I guess what I’m describing is the difference of trauma/suffering (both physical and mental) vs not. There’s too much psychology in play when dealing with how we handle trauma to trust a self reported metric.
The psychology being subjective is my point. The physiological condition is not subjective. My statement wasn’t that something was “objectively good” but that experiencing pain and suffering was “not objectively good” or rather (objectively) not a good thing. Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better.
> Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better.
But that’s observably false. There are persons who don’t feel pain, and they are considerably more likely to seriously injure or even maim themselves than normal persons. That’s hardly “objectively better.”
Furthermore, the existence of masochism shows that some people prefer pain to its absence at least some of the time. Thus “Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better” is just your subjective opinion.
Since we’re talking about subjective reports regardless, we may as well rely on the subjective reports of the people having the experiences rather than the subjective opinions of others who aren’t having the experiences.
If you can’t agree that physically harming people is bad, I don’t think we’re going to see eye to eye on this. But, your example of masochism is exactly my point. You can’t trust their reported state because people can bend their psychology to believe it to be fine. Nevertheless, torture/murder/rape, etc are all still objectively bad.
As an example: there are genuine cases of masochists that are subjectively happier because pain is being inflicted on them. In many of these cases no serious harm is done to their body. Your claim "you can't trust their reported state" is either 1) a claim that the outside observer knows better than the individual what their subjective state is or 2) that the health of the subject is more important than their subjective happiness.
If you are arguing for #1, I disagree. If you are arguing for #2, you should be more clear about why/how you keep using the word "objectively".
People can feel less happy when there is a lack of challenge in their life. Consider the example of the guy that spends his life wasting away in front of video games, going for impulsive pleasures instead of long term rewarding goals.
I would guess that each person has a different ideal level and variety of suffering (or responsibility, or challenge, or whatever you want to call it), for which their personality is best suited. We are so far removed from the challenges of the past that we don't know what the subjective experience would be like.
Yes. It’s easily googled. And they look like a normal healthy weight for the early 20th century[1]. Mama there has a healthy belly. Where are you seeing concentration camp victims?
Yeah this is a good point. I guess genetic determinism is just the contemporary scientific justification for a mentality that’s existed in some for a long time or indeed forever. (I’d be interested to know if other human cultures were more and accepting and supportive of personal growth.)
Explanation or justification? Does current scientific consensus (let's say there's one) say that this mentality is okay or that it's a bias that we should be aware (and try to correct against)?
I see genetics being used as a “just so” explanation for all kinds of things that the science doesn’t really support, by people with different ideologies depending on the thing they’re trying to justify.
We take obviously mostly-genetically-determined traits like height, eye/hair/skin colour, facial features etc, then extrapolate to argue/assume that all kinds of other things must also be genetically determined, like cognition, behavioral patterns, emotional patterns, for which there is far less evidence of them being hard-coded in DNA. This will be confounded by the fact that we can often see commonalities in these factors from parents to children and between siblings, and assume these commonalities exist due to genetic coding, not recognizing that there are other forms of inheritance/conditioning that can explain these commonalities, but that even if these inherited patterns are deeply ingrained, they can be altered via the right practices (emotional “letting go” being the most important in my experience).
Yes I’ve been exploring this topic (and undertaking personal growth work) for well over a decade.
I know all about the twin studies and the way they’re used to support all kinds of claims but that don’t actually hold up to scrutiny.
DNA just encodes proteins. It can’t explain/predict detailed behavioral patterns.
A prominent example of how genetics can influence aggressive/criminal behavior is due to variations in the MAOA (“Warrior”) gene, but the promotion/suppression of this gene is still strongly influenced by environmental factors [1].
Twin studies (particularly separated twin studies) claim to prove that all kinds of things are genetically encoded, because “they must be”, without considering how much is caused/influenced by other factors - the gestational environment and the experience of being separated from the birth family being the most obvious.
That’s not to say these behavioral patterns aren’t deeply ingrained and difficult/slow to change, but that’s very different from being hard-coded in DNA and impossible to change. For n=1 anecdata, I’ve significantly reduced my aggressive tendencies after years of growth work.
Are you willing to have a detailed discussion on this? I don't want to spend a few hours refreshing my knowledge of the research and gathering papers only to be ignored.
I read the abstract and skimmed the main content and couldn’t find anything that refutes what I’ve written or what I understand.
I’m fine to have a discussion if your intention is to achieve a shared understanding of the topic, which is what healthy debating is about and what this site seeks to cultivate (even if it rarely achieves it). It does seem a little like you’re more interested in “winning” an argument for a position you’re already invested in, but I’m happy to be shown otherwise and to engage in a discussion if you bring a spirit of shared learning to it.
Edit: rather than doing it here (in a thread that is already very long and stale) you can email me if you like (address in bio).
Further to my previous comment, before you write much on the topic, make sure you've properly read and considered what I've written (just the previous few comments relating to genetic determinism), in relation to the paper you shared. On reflection, I'm surprised you wrote "did you check out the paper I linked?", as if you assume it contains findings that contradict anything I've written, and it makes me think you might be intending to argue against something you assume I believe rather than something I actually believe. To be clear: (a) I believe very strongly in inheritance and common patterns of behaviour among family members; (b) I know of no research proving that behavioural patterns are entirely attributable to DNA code and/or are immutable, and (c) I'm aware of ways deeply ingrained patterns of behaviour can be significantly altered/abated when effective approaches are applied. The paper you linked doesn't make any specific claims relating to parts (b) or (c) of my statement.
Genetics is not a credible science, ie, it's just another one of the many sciences that thinks correlation is causation. This is because it can't do experiments, so it can't really show causation.
(Identical twins are close to a natural experiment but not a very good one as even they don't have the same genetics.)
This is a far stronger claim than I think you mean. We have a ton of evidence that those bits of DNA in our cells govern cell expression and even know in some cases that bit X being malformed causes bad condition Y (sure, you could hypothesize that they both have a common cause, but how the heck would that work? Correlation being causation works if both common cause and backwards causation are implausible, as they are often in genetics).
> but not a very good one as even they don't have the same genetics
Uhhh... they have almost exactly the same genetics. To a similar extent that two random cells from your body will have the same genetics. Yes, there will be a handful of mutations, but that's very unlikely to have an effect on any particular trait.
Who are you to tell us to not trust our eyes? When you're wrong at trivia, can you just claim "I meant [the right answer]"? If that's what you meant, perhaps you would have said it, but if you would had said it, it would have ruined your argument.
Simply put, you haven't made a convincing case that genetics, a science affecting all life, not just humans, is "not a credible science", despite indeed involving experiments all the time.
This is a bad defense because you're using "genetically determined", which is either meaningless or not true.
Height is not genetically determined unless you add "in an environment where nothing else that affects it happens". Like, say, someone cutting off your legs.
Saying something is genetically determined is not necessarily the same as saying it's completely genetically determined. And it's not meaningless, because there are things that aren't genetically determined at all, or at least are only genetically determined to such a small amount that they wouldn't be described as being genetically determined.
The only other thing to affect height is nutrition. Assuming the same nutrition, certain ethnicities will trend taller than others. Denying that is just straight stupidity because you can observe the trend just by going outside.
> The only other thing to affect height is nutrition.
And puberty blockers, pituitary gland diseases, and lack of sleep.
…and cutting your legs off.
> Assuming the same nutrition, certain ethnicities will trend taller than others.
See, one thing about statistics is they're not necessarily valid for individuals, because eg not all statistical distributions have any values at their averages.
Agreed, I think this is all downstream from recent macroeconomic forces in the west/America. Namely the "land of opportunity" in the post WW2 era has disappeared and the class structure has largely calcified and will carry over multiple generations. The anxiety people feel about not being one of the "top tier and chosen" is because that's the only avenue for social mobility left.
Or maybe it was always mostly BS and the information age where the message is less controlled/manipulated by a few elite owned sources is making that obvious.
